


Birdhouse in your Soul

by Liquid_Lyrium



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 13th Century CE, 14th Century, 6000 Years of Pining (Good Omens), 6000 Years of Slow Burn (Good Omens), Angel Crowley (Good Omens), Angels as eldritch horror, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Animal Death, Anxious Crowley (Good Omens), Archangel Michael's True Form, Aziraphale's True Form (Good Omens), Biblical Allusions (Abrahamic Religions), Blood and Injury, Body Horror, Comforting Aziraphale (Good Omens), Creation, Crowley Hates the 14th Century (Good Omens), Crowley Was Not Raphael Before Falling (Good Omens), Crowley is a Mess (Good Omens), Crowley was Samael Before Falling, Crowley's Plants (Good Omens), Crowley-centric (Good Omens), Crusades, Eldritch horror Aziraphale, Eldritch horror Michael, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fallen Angel Crowley (Good Omens), Flashbacks, Gen, Head Injury, Heavy Angst, Historical References, Hurt/Comfort, Livonia, M/M, Morality, Oblivious Crowley (Good Omens), Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pacifism, Pre-Canon, Pre-Fall (Good Omens), Protective Aziraphale (Good Omens), Scene: The Bandstand (Good Omens), Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Worth Issues, Some Humor, Stars, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, What if the Almighty isn't perfect just absolute?, background Famine/Pestilence, falling from grace, i guess, or the demonic version of it, plant torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2020-12-16 15:29:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21038477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liquid_Lyrium/pseuds/Liquid_Lyrium
Summary: In the eleven years and seven days leading up to Armageddon, Aziraphale and Crowley are having an argument. The worst one they've ever had. An Argument that Crowley has been having since The Beginning. About rules that he will not, cannot break. His one rule. The stellar rule:Crowley. Never. Kills.





	1. Prologue: But Really I’m Not Actually Your Friend

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It shouldn't have surprised Crowley, really. The End was always tangled up in The Beginning. Can't have one without the other.

**[London - One Day Before Armageddon]**

“It’s the Great Plan, Crowley.” The angel’s hands sketched out a nervous, useless arc.

“Yeah, for the record: Great pustulent mangled bollocks to the Great Blasted Plan!” Aziraphale couldn't know what those two words meant to him. How could he? He’d never talked about it. Just shown the edges of his anger when his defences were too low.

“May you be forgiven.” The demon wanted to laugh. As if the worst hadn’t already happened to him. Like he hadn’t been betrayed in the worst way. As if he hadn’t already Fallen.

Like that forgiveness is the angel’s to extend. As if he had access to the forgiveness that would _ fix _ this… unspoken thing that stands between them. Dividing them, binding them.

“I won’t be forgiven. Not ever.” She made damn sure of that. “Part of a demon’s job description. Unforgivable that’s what I am.”

“You were an angel once.” Aziraphale meant it as a comfort, but Crowley wasn’t in a mood to be comforted.

“That was a long time ago.” He closed the distance between them. Darkness drawing in as the sun set lower in the sky. “We find the boy, my agents can do it.”

“And then what? We eliminate him?” He couldn’t hold the angel’s gaze. He looked away, tried to play it off cool. Casual. Like he didn’t care that this could unmake him.

“Someone does, I’m not personally up for killing kids.” It’s as close to the truth as Crowley’s ever gotten to the subject. He’s never talked to Aziraphale about it. He’s never talked to anyone about it who would give a damn. (She had already given him a damn, and not one more, it seemed.) Give him an answer.

Aziraphale’s answer was far too swift. Terrible. Like the falling of a sword. A guillotine blade. “You’re the demon. I’m the nice one. I don’t have to kill children.”

Crowley wanted to laugh. _ The Nice One_. That’s rich. He’s seen what the kindness of angels can do. He’s seen what the kindness of _ this _ angel could do. And sometimes didn’t do.

He remembered a time where an angel’s kindness looked like letting a father ride for three days to find an altar in the mountains far from the boy’s mother.

It looked like letting a child gather the wood for his own pyre and lying to him.

It looked like a father tearing out his hair and pacing alone on a mountaintop for hours while his child lay frightened and bound. Of letting a father, asked to do the unthinkable, stand there in indecision with the blade clutched in his hand reflecting his son’s terrified eyes.

It looked like letting a father plunge a dagger towards his beloved son, only to catch his wrist at the last moment in a punishing grip.

It looked like a being wracked with guilt and confusion that his offering of the lamb was met with tears instead of joy.

It looked like a mountain where innocent blood was still spilled, and too much had been asked, despite deliverance.

It looked like kindness and mercy from a being that didn't understand the difference between good and evil.

He remembered all this in an instant, and Crowley tried to interrupt, but the angel barreled onwards.

He pulled his hand back before they could touch, because, if they touch, he would be lost and rudderless. He would no longer be angry. And he _ needed _ to be angry right now.

“If _ you _ kill him the world gets a reprieve, and Heaven does not have blood on its hands.”

For G-Sa- for _Fuck’s_ sake, it made him so _furious. _ That’s never been true. _ Never. _ He knows it’s _ never _ because it happened before time was a _ thing, _ and that meant it was always true.

_ Only you, Aziraphale. Only _ ** _you._ ** _ Only you would take _ ** _everything_ ** _ I’ve given, everything I’ve ever done and ask for _ ** _more_**_—and I’d do it! I’d do anything in the entire universe for you. You know that don’t you? Twice over! Drink holy water and live if you told me to! Find a way to claw my way back into Heaven. Throw myself into the farthest sun the universe has to offer. But not this. Not for anyone. Not even to save everything. _

_ Not even for you. _

“Oh no blood on your hands? That’s a bit holier-than-thou isn’t it?” ** _Your_ ** _ hands. Not Heaven’s. Say what you mean. You’re the only good thing left of them! The best of them! So don’t lie to me! Tell me you don’t want to sully the last pure thing to be found in Heaven. _

“Well I am, a great deal holier-than-thou. That’s the whole point.” He hated seeing Aziraphale withdraw further and further into himself. Like Crowley was someone from Upstairs because he isn’t behaving like somebody Downstairs.

“You should kill the boy yourself. Holi-ly.” It was a damn sight worse than his Temptation at the Crystal Palace, but it’s the best he can scrape together. The promise of glory he tried to invoke seemed especially thin.

"I am not. Killing. Anybody." The angel almost spoke with Divine Providence.

He was angry and proud at the same time. He felt sucker punched. A sword given away, and now it was stabbing him in the back.

_ How fucking dare you say that first? D'you know I've been trying to say that to you for six thousand years? Fuck you. I fucking hate you so much. (I don’t.) _

No point in saying it now. No point in baring his soul. They didn't have time anyway. And there was no way forward.

Not on Earth.

"This is ridic-you are ridiculous I don’t even know why I’m still talking to you." _ I do know why. _

"Well frankly neither do I." _ He doesn’t know. You never told him, now look what you did. _

"Enough I’m leaving." He meant it to be a capital 'L' but part of him still needed to cling to the appearance that none of this mattered at all and he could take it or leave it at any time. He wasn't trapped here, and Aziraphale wasn’t trying to destroy him with what he had asked.

“You can’t leave Crowley.” It hurt his chest just a little bit the way Aziraphale begged him to stay. He said it with his voice, not his words, and Crowley could hear it. _ Don’t leave me. _ “There isn’t anywhere to go.”

_ Show some imagination, angel! _ “It’s a big universe. Even if this all ends up in a puddle of burning goo we can go off together!” It wasn’t a Great Plan, admittedly, but it was _ a _ plan.

“Go off together?” There was the faintest moment where he saw it written in Aziraphale’s face. In the soft way he repeated the words. He wanted it. Without temptation, without reservation. Then it was gone, and Crowley hated Aziraphale’s love and trust in Ineffable Plans. “Wh-Listen to yourself.”

“How long have we been friends? Six thousand years!” He held his arms open, baring himself for another strike from that flaming sword. _ I’m trusting you, angel_.

“Friends, we’re not friends! We are an angel and a demon we have nothing whatsoever in common. I don’t even like you!”

Crowley rolled his eyes. He’d heard these protests before, and they were just as empty then as they were now. _ Don’t lie to me. _ “You _ do!” _

Aziraphale didn’t deny it.

“Even if I did know where the Antichrist was I wouldn’t tell you, we’re on opposite sides!” (The sardonic part of Crowley that never really shut up noted how quick the angel was to change his tune once he realized the devil wouldn’t do it and wouldn’t make him do it.) It didn’t matter to Crowley. It wasn’t about _ sides. _ It was that Aziraphale was asking _ that _ of him.

_ Opposite sides? _

Crowley stepped forward, hissing the next words fervently. A memory as old as Eden stirring. _ “We’re on our side!” _He was too wound up to put anything more than desperation beneath the words. It was the faintest sliver of hope that it could all be fixed still.

He remembered his promise now. How he phrased it. The terms. The covenant he had drawn for himself. There was still a chance, if only Aziraphale would say it, then—yes, yes, _ yes! _ Crowley would do the unthinkable. He would hold the blade, and turn the angel’s hand aside. He could do this for Aziraphale. As long as the angel says they’re on their own side, he’d be able to do it.

It would destroy him, but he’d do it.

He would give up after six thousand years for Aziraphale. He would falter, he would fail, and be undone.

“There is no ‘our side’ Crowley! Not anymore. It’s over.” The angel looked like he was going to weep. If such a being could. Time slowed to a crawling thing on its belly.

Crowley stood numb. Saved and damned at the same time. _ He doesn’t even know_. In one breath Aziraphale saved him, exalted him, and ruined him. Had pulled him from the deepest bowels of Hell and cast him from Paradise.

Had caught his wrist with a punishing grip made of iron and thunder.

The mercy of his angel was not tender.

His kindness was that of someone accepting unconditional surrender.

It hurt. It ached to know that Aziraphale saved him and spurned him. That he would have failed the test, if he had been led up to that mountaintop. That there was no third option to fix this fuckup. That it would be impossible for him to do this now. That he couldn’t protect the angel’s hands anymore, now that he’d picked a side. _ That’s why he’s sending you away. You failed him. Finally. After all these years. _

“Right. Well then. Nng.” He couldn’t look at the angel. If he couldn’t bear the angel’s comfort, then he certainly couldn’t bear his sorrow.

Crowley _ actually _ hoped to God Herself that he was never Forgiven and restored to angelhood. If this was what it felt like to be merely saved from Oblivion, he’d never survive the other half of the journey.

Crowley’s hands shook and he clenched them until his knuckles turned comet-white and still. He’d never walked straighter and more like a human being before in his life as he started to stalk off. Alone and afraid. Angry and hollow. Aching and relieved. Wracked and ruined.

At least now his list of priorities was narrowed down to one.

“Have a nice doomsday!”


	2. Chapter 1: Say I’m the Only Bee in Your Bonnet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the Beginning there was the Word and the Word was _Why?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is written from a very timey-wimey-wibbly-wobbly perspective because things are... complicated in the Beginning. Try not to worry about it too much. It is meant to be somewhat disorienting though.
> 
> Also in this particular story I don't necessarily view God/The Almighty as perfect. Just Absolute. And that is the lens She is written through.
> 
> Also I think there's a lot of stuff that fits with Crowley and [Samael](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samael) (though lots of other angels work too because there seems to be a degree of overlap in a lot of the named angels.) But the main reason why I picked Samael will hopefully be evident as well.

**[The Cosmos - ????]**

The star is nearly finished. He sings to it, the vibrations of his song shaping it as it grows. Yellow and bright. Big and luminous, throwing off photons and all sorts of radiation at a tremendous rate.

It’s almost perfect, but he’s out of fuel. He wants his labours to be perfect. Flawless. Radiant. Worthy.

She shows him where to gather more material.

There’s a big four-legged lumbering beast on a planet not so far from this star. He stares at it for a moment, hand outstretched. He twists his wrist. The shape of the beast dissolves, shimmering back into the star-stuff he had seen beneath its structure. The patterns unraveling and free, the atomic and subatomic particles free for the gathering.

_ Why did it stop being...? _

Everything has a season. Everything must end

She’s still answering questions. (Still? Why would…? Is she going to stop?)

_ What's a season? Why? Why can't it stay like this forever? _ He sees no reason to shake things up. He would be content doing this forever. Creating star after star, beauty trailing in his wake.

He doesn’t receive an Answer.

He takes the material, gathers it into his arms, and he continues to shape the star in Silence. He leaves it a little unfinished. It is supposed to be a perfect twin of the other, but something seems… He isn't sure what it seems. He's never experienced this sensation before. There isn't a Word yet to describe it. He's always been happy, elated, joyous, rapturous, but this feels like… something else. Something that… isn't that.

It will come to him later. Once later exists.

He looks at the stuff in his arms, glittering like a stellar nursery, and he vows to make the next one smaller too. Smaller than what the Great Design calls for. Some of the starstuff has spilled down the front of his Heavenly raiment and it looks rather like the cosmos itself. Stardust on black. As good a place as any to tuck the excess away. He's seen others put the stuff on their faces and hands.

It happens again. He runs out of raw materials. He can't make this star too small because otherwise this system will never support life. The Great Plan details something special here. Samael ignores a new feeling as he looks at the single star. It seems… _ something _ after his last creation. There isn't a Word for it yet, but later it will come to him: lonely. It seems lonely.

There are planets here and waiting. Eight settled, and there's some sort of… unharmony by one of the terrestrial committees about planets nine and ten, if they should even _ be _ for a start. And if so when.

It’s a bit confusing, as time hasn’t been invented yet. The order of things isn’t always clear. It’s a disorienting experience, even for celestial beings. Samael’s pretty good at pushing away confusion, at things that probably haven’t happened yet, but once in awhile it gives him _ insight_. And unease. He has to trust the Almighty has a plan for the things he sees that give him worry through these slivers of omniscience. 

There's creations on this planet too. Third from the incomplete sun. Samael finds the nearest one—a great big thing in the sea that harmonizes the Divine choir. 

Not that one. This one here. She stays his hand. She’s not present physically but it doesn’t matter.

It isn’t that one’s time.

He doesn't understand, but he obeys. A flick of his wrist and he unmakes someone else's work. It’s like that for a time. He’ll find something to unravel, and She stops him, corrects him.

Soon he doesn’t need Her guidance at all. He can _ see _ it. Which ones are ready, ripe for the taking. Just like he can _ see _ where the stars are supposed to be hung and how hot they need to burn.

_ Why can't they be like us? Why do they have to end? _

She does not answer.

_ Why do you have me unravel them? _

She does not answer.

He works on other stars, but he labours on this one too. Keeping it just hot enough to sustain the things on the third planet. The planetary committee seems to still be arguing, but maybe they’ve also been done with the planetary system here for eons.

Really, they need to get on with things and fucking invent time already.

And perhaps because time has not been invented, Samael cannot put off completing this particular labour forever.

Things start to happen rather quickly, after that. In part because time is finally invented. The creation of the Universe is much more orderly when things are allowed to happen in the proper sequence. He forgets things that he saw that haven’t happened yet, but some of the insights remain.

It leaves him with questions. Questions that buzz under his skin like the multitude of tiny winged creations that Kabaiel seems to have endless designs for.

There are creatures that almost look like them on this planet. That look like Her. He unravels them too, when he needs more stuff for the heavens. The questions buzz louder. Crawl into the celestial structures that work like bones, between the spaces of his electrons. He can’t make sense of it all, of what the slivers left behind, can’t see the scope of the Almighty’s great, ineffable plan.

_ Why does it make me unhappy? _

She does not answer.

Earth was not the first planet in creation to have life. It is one of countless iterations, but also the most interesting, in Samael’s opinion. It’s where things _ changed_.

She does it quite suddenly. No great fanfare or announcement. Just a wave of her hand and the planet is bare of life. It isn’t like when Samael gathers the stuff for his stars. Everything, all creatures great and small, are just _ gone_.

And then She starts again.

Earth is the only place in the entire Universe where creatures are not created directly from starlight. Adam she makes out of mud. The creatures too. Earthdust, not stardust. It’s of the same original stock, but first transformed. Filtered.

It makes no sense.

It is still before the First Day. Time has been invented, but Days have not. It’s still complicated, this side of Eden. Free Will is still on the horizon too.

Samael finally arrives at the moment where he learns the Words for _ lonely _ for _ unhappy_. He stands apart from his fellow angels, observing Earth, stuck in a holding pattern as She creates life there again. (The planet and Time are waiting patiently for her work to be finished before it starts again.) Unlike most he wears robes made of night. Of deepest black and dusted with galaxies. The others wear armor and gleaming tabbards. Raiments of gold and star-white. The others do not have questions that rattle around the very fiber of their beings, threatening to unravel them like a crook of the wrist. He feels like a star out of place. Somewhere it is not supposed to be, but there’s no guiding hand to nudge him back into place. Set him right.

Until he falls into the orbit of Morningstar.

For a bit, he feels less lonely. It feels good to have _ someone _ answer his questions when he asks about the Plans.

He isn’t sure how it all happens when the Rebellion comes. He didn’t see this coming, didn’t experience _ this _ before. Now that there is such a thing as before and a proper order to things. He didn’t see the War, and perhaps this is where he actually learned the Words for _ lonely _ and _ unhapppy_. He's never felt more lonely as he evades the fighting, flees from the clash.

But then there is a Fall and he is no longer what he was.

His name is stripped from him as he Falls. There is pain, and oh no, this. _ This _ is where he learns the meaning of the Words _ lonely _ and _ unhappy _ as he’s cut off from even Her Silence.

It is maddening an unbearable in the opposite way of experiencing the future and time all out of joint.

It’s strange how much longer the distance seems to take, travelling this way. Once he could have crossed it with but a thought, crossed it as fast or as slow as he wanted. He can’t. He wonders why that is.

She does not answer.

\---

**[Eden - Day 16]**

_ Get up there and make some trouble. _

Crawley decided he liked the sound of that. He also decided he didn’t like the sound of his name, but that was something he could set aside for the time being. He could almost half-remember what it was going to be.

At this point, Days had been invented, and time had resumed on Earth. Adam had an Eve, and perhaps two other wives before that, but now it was only Eve. (It was still complicated, within Eden itself.)

He watched the humans. He watched the animals. He watched the angel on the wall.

He watched the stars wheel overhead.

He still remembered their layout. Their complicated movements. The ones he had left too small and unfinished. Seemed a bit like wasted effort now. A pointless rebellion in the face of the one that followed.

Crawley smiled, struck by a truly awful idea. He thought that was good. Or bad. Or something that a demon should do, at any rate.

He remembered the process. What if he just… put another star up there? Caused a little bit of a traffic jam? A nice little game of celestial billiards as a new source of gravity nudged everything ever so slightly out of place?

He didn’t have everything he used to have, but Crawley had an _ imagination _ so he made use of it. He plucked a hair from his head, and knotted it up. Approximately 4.2 light years away he saw the kernel of it. The faintest wisp of a red dwarf. The core of it. Flaming like his hair. It needed more than that, though.

There was a creature nearby. Lumbering and slow. He had heard Adam and Eve argue about what to call it, but they had settled on _ Bear_. It reminded him a bit of the first time he gathered the materials for his stars.

He reached out, and it was a bit harder to see everything he needed, but he knew it was there. Earthdust had come from stardust, after all, no matter what She had done to it. Crawley twisted his wrist—and instead of unraveling into millions of pieces, the mighty legs buckled under it, and it slumped to the ground, falling over whole.

His heart pounded against his chest and Crawley suddenly knew the Word for fear quite intimately. Like Adam knew Eve. He twisted his wrist again, and still the creature remained—resolutely stitched together. A third twist and he saw a few strands of fur twist away into carbon and nitrogen. Useless for his star.

And Crawley finally understood.

Already Fallen, already damned, he understood all he had done and he screamed. He fell to his knees. A pained howl torn from him as he finally _ understood _ that he had _ murdered, _ long before the troublesome offspring growing within Eve’s womb. It left him ruined with new questions. _ Why? Why did you make me do this!? Why didn’t I know!? Why didn’t I listen to that feeling under my skinstuff in between my electrons? How could you do this to me!? _

She did not answer.

He rearranged himself into something limbless and new. The shape of it burned onto his temple by the Fall. He reached for it blindly. Hoping against hope it would dull the pain as he bored into the earth.

It did not, and he couldn’t even scream this way. He started shifting back, but the fear was still laced through his chest, and the pain. He would rather be unmade than be _ this_. Than live with this. He didn’t even spare a thought for if the humans or angel could hear him as his mouth formed again. As he crawled out of the earth half man-shaped thing half-legless thing.

(And even though they were not _ there _ did not _ exist _ before Days, Adam and his kin will always remember the angel of death. Always fear him as he was. The echoes of what he did are written into the universe. The strangeness of things that happened before time left imprints everywhere. Somehow, much later at the end of the world, it does not surprise Crowley that Death is shrouded in black robes and has wings of night with pinpricks of light that might be stars. Creation’s shadow, indeed.)

He screamed and cursed the Almighty until his throat was raw, and under the perfect skies of Eden he made a vow.

He had killed for heaven. He wouldn’t kill for hell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got like.... super intrigued by how Crowley dispatches people in the show, so here we go. It's gonna be another sad one lads, but it'll eventually get better.


	3. Chapter 2: So the Room Must Listen to me Filibuster Vigilantly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And so it came to pass that Crowley caused trouble, but somehow he always seemed to cause the most for himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "We are our own devils, we drive ourselves out of our Edens" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
> 
> (AKA: The chapter in which we deal with the plants and it isn't nice because that's a four-letter word and Crowley isn't nice.)

**[Eden - Five Days Before the First Rain]**

_ You like tests so much? Fine. This is a test. _

Crawley had spent most of his time as the limbless thing since making his last star. After his grief and anger were exhausted. Eve had glimpsed him and given him a name. Snake. Then she reconsidered. Serpent. Then she shrugged, and evidently decided they were close enough to be the same thing.

Crawley wasn’t sure how he felt about either of those names. They felt accurate but they also made him… unhappy. (He knew most humans in the future wouldn't like snakes or serpents.)

He tasted the air. The rock beneath his endless belly was warm.

_ I'm testing You. _

He actually hadn't decided. Not really. He still went back and forth on it. Had been for days. He couldn't deny it felt wonderfully subversive, issuing the challenge. To be the one issuing the test for a change. Yesterday he hated the idea, certain that it was all part of Her plans, and he didn’t want anything to do with those.

But he’d made a promise.

And—whomever was testing whom—it _ was_, clearly, a test.

_ Do Your worst. You can use all of Heaven, your Great Plans, and even Hell. Just try and make me do it again. Go on, make me. _

He didn’t know if She could hear him. She was, supposedly, all-knowing and Almighty. So even if he didn’t have Her ear in the same way anymore, surely he was _ heard. _ Unless She blocked out Her Disgraced children. In which case She _ couldn’t _ be all-knowing.

He hoped She could hear. He wanted the worst.

(He had the sense that he would someday sympathize with a Jephthah about imprudent promises to God, and involving Her without stopping to consider the consequences.)

**[Eden - The Day of the First Rain]**

Humans, at least, did not have so far to fall, the demon reflected, watching the humans get smaller and smaller from his perch on the wall. Crawley doubted they could have withstood the journey through space and the subsequent landing in the sulfurous, baptismal pits of desolation waiting at the end. Adam was wrestling with the lion carcass, dragging it away from the pool of blood it was felled in. He marvelled at the feat, and he wondered where Adam found such strength._ Do all humans have a secret well of power? _

He stood quietly next to the angel, half-hypnotized by the sound of rain falling on white wings. _ Did I do the right thing? _

There were two trees in the garden. Much like Eve and Adam, Crawley had needed to choose. He clutched a cold, bony hand into a fist. He had chosen to tempt Eve to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The other, the Tree of Life (which would be overlooked in simpler tellings of the tale) would have given humanity eternal life.

The wind had picked up, and he drew his wings tighter around himself. He was full of more doubt than he ever had in Heaven.

_ Supid bugger, why didn’t you make it easy on yourself? _

Only that was it, wasn’t it? Seemed too easy. He didn’t trust it. Didn’t trust _ Her _ as far as She could throw him. And a not so tiny sliver of Crawley didn’t _ want _ it to be that easy. Wanted to _ prove _ something. If everyone lived eternally what worth would his promise have?

_ Too late to take it back now. _

Everything in this moment was uncertain. Had he damned the human race? Was this the right thing? The wrong thing? The right thing that would get him in trouble downstairs? Worst of all, was this all according to Her plan?

For all the talk of ineffability, he saw lines of worry on the angel’s face too. They stood together in silence, watching the humans. Weathering the first storm.

Crawley shoved his hands into his armpits. The very picture of dignity. _ Flaming sword would’ve been good to have about now. This rain nonsense is fucking freezing. _

He could see the angel's gift on the horizon. Much more practical than a mouthful of fruit. Glittering like a firefly. He saw how much colder the humans were too. Adam was furiously carving at the skin of the beast he’d slain. Eventually he offered it, bloody and ragged, to Eve who wrapped it around her barely-covered skin.

Crawley glanced over at the angel. Lit up like a beacon in infrared. A rock in sunshine. Pity he couldn’t get close enough to soak up that warmth. The angel may have given away his sword, but it was still best to be cautious.

He knew better than anyone that there were limits to Heaven’s kindness.

Eventually, the sky stopped being angry, and the water stopped falling. He shook his wings out at the same time as the angel, throwing off water droplets. Crawley felt a fine mist land against his leg.

“Oh, I do apologize. I didn’t mean to get you any wetter.”

The demon shrugged, “Probably got you as well.”

“Allow me,” the angel reached his hand up and pulled his fingers down in a _ snap _ before Crawley could throw himself backwards off the wall to avoid the burst of celestial power.

He paused, wings half-unfurled, as he realized that he was _ dry_.

The angel somehow managed to look more worried than he had before. “Oh, my apologies. I didn’t mean to startle you. That was presumptuous of me.” The angel’s hair had regained its light, cloud-like appearance.

“‘S fine,” he mumbled, feeling vaguely ashamed. Ridiculous. He was a _ demon_. He was supposed to be incapable of feeling shame. “Right, got to go. Nice talking to you. See you ‘round, angel. Aziraphale.” (He suddenly just _ knew _ the other's name.) And Crawley threw himself back off the wall and dove back down into the Garden, a terrible heat and dread clawing up his throat as the ground rushed towards him.

He opened his wings a second too late.

_ Not the worst fall I’ve had, _ Crawley observed a moment later as he impacted into soft earth and moss. He spit out some mud and brushed himself off. _ Suppose I should burrow back downstairs and report a job well done… or… done. _Maybe he’d leave out the existential crisis from his report and just focus on the fact that he got the Almighty’s favorite pets and exercise in vanity thrown out of their little terrarium.

He changed back into his legless form… the snake. Come to think of it, why did a human get to name him? Who'd named him Crawley in the first place? Why couldn’t he name himself? Rude.

Eden would be gone soon. He knew that much. Something in his chest stirred at that. Another creation gone with a wave of Her hand. He wondered if it was the same when She decided to restart life on Earth. If someone had done something she didn’t like. Stepped a toe out of line. Disobeyed the Great Plan. Touched something forbidden. Asked a question. Asked '_Why?'_

He slithered through the garden. It seemed a shame. After watering everything. All these perfect plants, they were beautiful. He hated to admit it. As a star-crafter he hadn’t really had the opportunity to get a close look at these smaller details. He’d only ever alighted on a planet to… well. He’d never taken the time to stop and smell the roses back then. There was something remarkable about working on a scale this small. Working with stars was rather forgiving. Plenty of time to course correct. All these creatures great and small were microscopic in comparison. Incomparably delicate. He tried to remember who they’d been, who they became, but hadn’t there been an angel who made the smallest creatures? Most of them buzzing. Butterflies, gnats, dragonflies, and a galaxy’s worth of beetles? Who was that? What was their name?

Eventually Crawley stopped asking the question. He’d yet to meet a demon who dared disclose what they’d done up in Heaven.

He stopped under _ the _ tree.

Crawley stared at the pink blossoms and red fruit. He saw the discarded apple underneath the tree. Still perfect, but for two bites taken from it._ Would it really be so bad to know the difference between Good and Evil?_

Maybe he’d know if he made the right choice. Or the wrong one. Or the one that wouldn’t get him in trouble with his bosses.

He slithered closer, not breathing at all. Something that was far more noticeable in his bipedal form. He encircled the fruit in the center of his coils. Not touching it. Just surrounding it, like it might try and escape. He flicked out his forked tongue. Just grazing the white flesh. It was… tangy. Crawley didn’t feel any sudden rush of brain chemicals. No bone-deep sense of _ knowing_.

_ Maybe you have to eat it? _

He could have unhinged his jaw and swallowed the thing whole, but that seemed to go against the spirit of the enterprise. Crawley grew back his legs, hand already reaching for the discarded apple.

He turned it over in his palms, pondering.

“Get up there and make some trouble,” he muttered to himself, staring at a patch of red, unblemished skin.

_ Don’t touch, huh? _ Crawley tossed the apple up and caught it again in hand.

“...Well, it might be easier to make trouble if I _ know _ what Good and Evil are.” He smirked. There was no way She had seen this coming. That rule was for the humans. _ It’s not like I can get any more damned, right? Already leaving the Garden after this. _

He brought the apple to his lips and exposed his teeth, a motion more serpent than human or divine. He pierced the skin and ripped out a bite of the forbidden fruit. Juice trickled down his chin as he ground the apple between formerly pristine dentition. This time he tasted tangy-sweet along his tongue. The flavor rippled through him like fire. Sweet. Perfect. All the better for being forbidden.

He waited for the revelation. For prophets and fire. For stars and synapses. For _ something, _but he felt nothing. No change, apart from deciding that this was the best (if only) thing he’d ever eaten.

He stared at the apple thoughtfully. “Well, that was a disappointment.” _ Is this supposed to be some sort of answer? What does it mean? Are we-angels and demons not capable of understanding Good and Evil? Just not allowed? Why’d You give them the ability then? And deny it to them? Then punish them when they finally got it and used it? You could have made them the same as us. _

He frowned, and took another savage bite, glaring over at the Tree of Life which was hiding in the shade of the Tree of Drops Smelly Seed Pods.

_ You could have always made them the same as us. _

Crawley devoured the rest of the apple viciously. He even waited an hour to see if digestion would cause some sort of reaction.

Nothing.

He chucked the disgusting center of the fruit into one of the countless, placid ponds of the garden before forming himself back into a snake.

He did have a sudden, dreadful certainty that he _ had _ made the wrong decision. He knew where _ this _ knowledge came from, because it was _ always _ telling him he’d made the wrong decision. Independent of disappointing produce. It was from the fear that had taken residence in him and refused to leave. Cleaving to him like a jealous lover. Touching every bit of his corporation from the inside. From lungs to bones.

_ Shut up. _

The disquiet living in his bones did not shut up. Not that it _ said _ things. Exactly. Except for when it did. Generally it just made… noise. But not noise. Radiation maybe, or like the rumbling noises the stars made. Whatever it was it wasn’t _ quiet. _

He gave the best sigh a snake could give and started burrowing down through the earth, until he was burrowing through space and time to reach somewhere else entirely.

**[London - The Day Before the End of the World Although It Sort of Feels Like Armageddon Got a Head Start and That’s Some Bullshit]**

Crowley pulled up to his flat, tires skidding over the curb.

Where could he go? _ We’re fucked. _ No. Not ‘we.’ No more ‘we.’ Crowley felt every bruise along his ribcage from every horse that had kicked him over the last six-thousand odd years.

_ I’m fucked. _

Alone.

He hadn’t been this alone since before Eden. Before the Rebellion. During his Fall.

(Was it now, _ this _ moment? Was this where he learned the meaning of the Word lonely?)

“Well, I have a day to think about it.” Why did it sound like someone else said it? A stranger? Even his vessel couldn’t keep him company, was that it?

He felt detached, something close to discorporated as he watched his hands released the Bentley’s wheel and his feet carried him up towards his flat.

He bypassed the lift entirely. He stepped into his front door. He felt a little bit more grounded as the cool air of his flat washed over him.

“Think about it tomorrow,” he sounded a little more like himself. That was a good decision. Put it off.

Crowley pulled off his sunglasses and tossed them dramatically to one side. He heard them skid along concrete. Out of sight, out of mind. He stormed over to the throne room. His eyes roved over the Ansaphone. No messages._ Why would there be?_ _Why did you call him? You stupid idiot. You fucked this up. If you hadn’t called we wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be here._

The demon was misery incarnate, but for the first time since he crafted the stars, he wasn’t heavy with cloying fear. It was strangely freeing. It was _awful_. He hoped whoever came up with the idea of _feelings_ was somewhere among the Fallen. He shambled into the plant room. He clutched the mister like a loaded gun. He sprayed the plants without any semblance of tenderness.

“Right, let’s see how you lot are coming along. Armageddon tomorrow, you know.” He sniffed, trying to taste weakness on the air. “Got to be strong if you want a shot at surviving.” His voice was rough and low. If his plants heard a tremor there, they did well to pretend they hadn’t.

He paced the room. The plants quivered. Crowley scowled and started looking at the underside of leaves after his third pass had revealed nothing imperfect. “What’s this?” His thumb brushed along the stem of an African violet. A tiny insect flew away, put off by the general aura the demon was radiating. He wasn’t sure if it was a gnat or a fruit fly, but it was good enough. Bad enough.

“Oh, inviting vermin into my home, is that it?” Crowley raised a brow, staring down his nose haughtily at the quivering violet. “Trying to make yourself look better by bringing everyone else down to your level, is that it?” The demon bent down, nose pressing against the soft, fuzzy fibers of the leaf. “Clever, clever, too clever by half, but it won’t work,” he hissed the words through his teeth. The plant rather looked like it would love nothing more than to spill out of its container. Crowley stood up, swaggering around the room, making sure the other plants were paying attention to him. “Right. I have told you all, on multiple occasions, what my standards are. Have I not?” He waited for a response and then bellowed out a _ “WELL!?” _ A creeping ficus in the corner suddenly grew another six inches of foliage and started spontaneously producing gooseberries.

The demon nodded approvingly. “See? This one _ gets _ it. Unlike your _ friend _here. Not your friend anymore, is he?” Crowley’s hand darted out, quick as lightning and he had the African violets pot clutched in bony fingers. “No, he’s…” The demon froze, throat locking up. He’d never stumbled during a sentencing like this. “Look, you were warned, alright? Eleven years ago.” His voice cracked. The African violet was a bit confused as it had only been living in the flat—in terror—for six months. “Don’t look at me like that. You had a warning! Can’t have you bringing Pestilence down in here. There’ll be no stopping the other horseman then. Then it’ll be too late. ‘S already too late. Shut up!” He slammed the pot against the windowsill. All he saw was Aziraphale cracking a spoon against a shell of hard chocolate enveloping some gelato. He grabbed the mass of soil bound together by the roots.

“You were _ warned_,” he hissed again, fingers tightening on their own. “You better fucking four-letter hope you’re strong enough to face tomorrow, you little weed.” With that he took the plant, root mass, and soil with him down the adjoining staircase.

Crowley did not kill his plants. Perhaps it would have been kinder if he did, but nothing about his plants had anything to do with being_ kind_. That was a four-letter word, that.

It was a minor miracle, one he was very familiar with. He kept the plant alive as he picked apart the root system, plucked the leaves he hated, until it was left a skeleton of its former self. It wasn’t dead. Theoretically, it would have a chance to survive. It was warned. It didn’t live up to his standards. It had the same chance to survive as all the other rejects. Vow intact.

(He did run the plucked foliage through the garbage disposal, just to hammer home his displeasure to the others.)

“You had a chance to stay in the garden, but you blew it. Couldn’t follow a few simple rules, eh? Think they don’t apply to you? Won’t be my fault if you can’t dig through the pavement. You should be strong enough to do that.” He walked over to a panel on the exterior wall. “I told you to grow better, didn’t I? Told you to be the best you could. Won’t be my fault if you can’t crawl over and live in the rain gutter. And it won’t be my fault if you can’t convince someone to take pity on you and take you home and give you shelter.” His traitorous throat went thick on him again. He pulled the panel open, a yawning blackness behind it. “Understand? You’re responsible for your own survival.”_Not me._ With that, he chucked the plant down the garbage chute, knowing it would end up on the pavement. Alive for the next forty-eight hours at least.

Crowley snorted. _ Wasted miracle. There aren’t forty-eight hours left for this planet. More of a chance than you deserve then. _ He stomped back up the staircase. He flicked some of the dirt off his fingertips at the survivors on his way out of the room. “Don’t fuck it up tomorrow you lot. No second chances at the end of the world.” The words should have terrified him, opened up a yawning canyon of fear inside his chest, but it didn’t happen.

Crowley threw himself onto his throne, and curled up in a very improbable manner, turning his back to the plant room. He didn’t want to look at them. They might be ash this time tomorrow. _ Is it all really going to end? There has to be something. Something. G-Sat-Someone, please, tell me there’s something to be done. Somebody, please. _ He was just so tired. That’s what it was. He was tired, he wasn’t thinking properly. He must have overlooked something.

He wasn’t waiting for the phone to ring.

He wasn’t.

It’s what he told himself as he let his chin fall to his chest, and his eyes close.

He wasn’t waiting for Someone to call.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Crowley has zero self awareness. And when he does have the audacity to have awareness he buries it in denial and represses the Hell out of it. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
> 
> Also Crowley absolutely invented the panic attack. And social anxiety. <strike>And being useless around your crush.</strike> I love that he 100% yote himself out of an awkward conversation.


	4. Chapter 3: I’d be Fired if That Were my Job

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the Flood the Lord had promised: "Nor will I ever again destroy all living things, as I have done," which Crowley noticed was a rather gaping loophole.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I can't think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can't talk to, or worse, someone I can't be silent with." - Marry Ann Shaffer
> 
> Content warnings for this chapter: angelic forms as eldritch/lovecraftean horror including some body horror, Crowley thinking a lot about strangulation/throat holds in a way that may or may not be erotic? Some minor blood/injury stuff. The Black Plague and including some very oblique references to the social effects at the time. Also archangel dickishness and absolutism.
> 
> EDIT: Um.... this has never happened to me, but as I was working on the next chapter I realized, oops. Oops, oops, oops, oops! Nope! This belongs in this chapter! So enjoy. I made some minor edits to the pre-existing Black Death segment but nothing major if you only want to read the newest section.

**[London - The Last Night Before the End of the World as We Know It]**

Crowley was still piled into his throne, bent in entirely too many places for a human spine to function. He dreamed.

He remembered.

He waited for the phone to ring. (He wasn't. _He wasn't._)

**[Livonia - Somewhere in the General Neighborhood of 1240]**

As a rule, Crowley avoided battles as much as possible. That hadn’t changed since the first battle between Heaven and Those Who Would Become of Hell. He could not avoid War. Not completely. Not when he was called to play some part in them—though Crowley passed those jobs off as much as possible. He noted, unhappily, that she grew crueler and crueler every time they had the misfortune to cross paths.

He did his best to keep his distance, but she would always find him. At some point, there would be a lull, a break in the fighting and he would _ see _ her standing there across the field. With a smile reserved just for him. Wicked and sharp as a cruciform sword, her own hair red and blazing like his. A resemblance he wasn’t comfortable with.

She was mocking him.

_ I’ll see you at the End of Days. _ Her smile carved the promise into his skin. Over and over. _ You’ll take part in me yet _ —the glimmer of her teeth a lance through his spine. _ Avoid me while you can; I’ll take you in the end. _ He could hear it in her joyous laugh over blood spilling and bones breaking. _ I’ll take you into my arms, into my ranks, into me and you will fight the last, glorious battle. A Ragnarok. A reckoning. _ He knew it, deep in his bones, like a knife sliding between the joints of his armor. _ Even if you flee, I will take you and you will fall in me— _the pronouncement an arrow to the throat, brutal and final.

His cowardice amused her. An endless source of entertainment across the ages.

Crowley didn’t want to think about Armageddon and the next battle between Hell and Those Who Were Still of Heaven. It was a long way off still, a tomorrow problem. Not even that. He didn’t have to think about ancient history repeating itself. About sworn adversaries who sometimes tried to drink you under the table and argue the finer points of Tang poetry dressed in tabard and mail.

Crowley was meant to be attempting to stir up animosity between the two halves of the Great Schism. Though there was some excitement up in Novgorod, the bulk of the fighting was between the Catholics and the pagans, which the demon was desperately trying to figure out how to spin in his reports. Crowley had a soft spot for the pagans. Even when they were working against their own self-interests—or perhaps _ especially _ because they worked against their own self-interests—in forming alliances with the crusaders against their rival neighbors. There were too many to keep track of. Livs, Latgallians, Semigallians, Curonians and that didn’t even cover all of Livonia, to say nothing of the lands to the north. As his long-time associate loved to say, they sowed the seeds of their own destruction.

As much as it made him feel obsolete, he could only admire the self-destructive urges innate in humans. _ Like calls to like _ . A very ancient thing in him ached, and he realized it was the vestiges of angelic pride. Stung by the thought he was the same as these mortals. That his divinity had been stripped away and he was reflected in warped beings borne of mud and dust. _ Does anyone live up to Your idea of perfection? _ He’d thought his creations as an angel were perfect, but the millennia had taught him that oh so many of his stars and systems suffered from orbital decay. The consequences of meddling with The Plan, he supposed. _ Maybe. Maybe You aren’t perfect either. Is that the resemblance they bear to You? Fucking up Your own designs? How many times did You throw Your toys away because they didn’t do what You wanted? Cleared the board more than a few times when they were too boring. Doing everything they were programmed to do, but You got pretty pissed off with Free Will, too, as I recall. Upended the toybox. Tore up the Garden. Flooded the bath. _Would explain a lot, honestly. A fractal imprint the universe couldn’t get away from.

_ Better to be a flawed creation than designed to fail, right? _

Aside from the same self-defeating tendencies innate in all humans, pagans, in Crowley’s opinion, were not as misguided as the self-proclaimed earthly representatives of Heaven claimed they were. And he’d encountered more varieties and flavors of pagans than even the most adventurous crusader. They got about as much right as any other belief system he’d encountered, though sometimes Crowley felt they got more things right in more important ways than the churches that claimed to bear the name of a carpenter from Galilee.

He remembered Golgotha, still, and he wondered what the young man who had flipped tables in the Temple and taken up whips against merchants and money changers would think of the barely-disguised banditry that were the crusades. Well, wondered what he would _ do, _ rather.

Honestly, Crowley had no idea how Downstairs expected him to keep up with all this. Humans, being such temporary, ephemeral creatures, worked at breakneck speed compared with the slow-moving pace of angels and those who were originally of angel stock. He was fairly certain there were at least four crusades going on at the moment, and Crowley would be damned if he could trace out the complicated alliances between pagan and formerly pagan tribes and the Teutonic Order and the Swedes and the Danes and whoever else was mucking about here.

It was the sort of mess he only ever understood after. Well after, when historians had carefully summarized the whole thing which he then heard second-hand from the lips of an angel. Crowley had never really been one for what his fellows called _ craftsmanship_. He was built to handle things on the scale of solar systems, of galaxies. For vast machines and complicated, intricate little movements and interactions that played off each other and grew like ripples in a pond. Wired to orchestrate the migration of interstellar objects—simple nudges of gravity that reaped great rewards with little effort and enough time. He could do things this small, if asked, but it was like trying to fit into a mould made for someone else. Rather like another role he’d given up long ago.

War smirked across the battlefield at him. Pinning him in place with her coup-de-gras smile. Crowley had been thrown from his horse, so it was only slightly more humiliating than usual. Drach—now nowhere to be seen—was a great night-black charger with hooves that sparked the ground like flint against steel. Like all Hell’s steeds. Stupid things. _ Ooh, I’ve got it, let’s send a hellhorse for the Snake of Eden to get around on. Nothing could possibly go wrong. Brilliant idea. _There had to be a better way to haul around his corporation. At least he’d only been trampled by a recalcitrant horse twice.

His sword, unbloodied but unsheathed, was tight in his hand. He mostly used it as a particularly sharp baton. Directing troops and posing heroically to inspire and improve morale. The latter was generally less successful than the former, so Crowley resorted to terror instead to galvanize the forces under his control and intimidate the forces designated as his enemy of the day.

He’d never been a good head for battle.

Crowley lay among the dirt and he very seriously considered not getting up and letting himself be discorporated. Then the decision was out of his hands as a human stood above him with sword raised.

_ Oh bloody Heaven. I didn’t really want to write a discorporation report. _

There was the faintest snap, the smallest upward twitch of his hand, and suddenly the warrior above him fell to the ground, one leg wrenching painfully underneath him as his foot sank deep into the mud. Poor bugger dropped his sword.

Crowley scarpered away. His specialty.

Cowardly though it may have been, he felt a faint surge of pride. No matter what happened to the man after—and the battlefield could be a perilous place—Crowley had yet to kill in self-defense over the long centuries.

_ Bested You again. Joke's on You if you think I wouldn’t let myself be discorporated just to prove a point. _

The first time he’d needed to protect himself, back when Assyria was threatening to exist, he’d panicked, and caused his assailant to tumble down a flight of stairs. It was half-luck and half-miracle that there was a pile of woven mats and a landing to break his attacker’s fall. Broken, bruised, but still alive.

He’d become much more careful after that. More paranoid. More creative in crafting his escapes.

And how funny it was that despite knowing and encountering an angel several times on this, the Almighty’s green and sometimes muddy Earth, it was a human he’d needed to protect himself against first.

In his eagerness to scamper away Crowley ran headlong into a war hammer, sword dropping from his hand. He felt a tooth—no, teeth—come free of their homes and he dropped to the ground again, his head ringing like a bell. The blow would have killed an ordinary man.

Crowley was anything but ordinary.

He turned his head with a groan, spitting out blood and three teeth that were too pointed and skinny to be wholly human. He looked up and he was too groggy to reach for a miracle. His head full of fog and pain, too slow to think, to _ imagine _ an escape route for this. His vision doubled the dark shape of the infantryman above him, hammer raised high, and Crowley started mentally preparing his discorporation report.

He felt it a moment before it happened. A deep rumble like an earthquake before a blinding rush of fur, muscle, and heat ripped past him. The infantryman was flattened by the oncoming cavalry. The demon held his breath as horse after horse leapt over him, flashing back to less charitable steeds purposely trampling him.

Then the rumble travelled further and further away, until he could no longer feel it transferred through the mud. Then he felt something new. Rhythmic and singular. Cantering hoof-falls. Heavy with the weight of an armored knight. Crowley blinked as silver hooves slowed and stopped in his field of vision. A little too close to his head to be comfortable. The horse let out an agitated snort, and he heard the clink of metal against metal and then the heavy thunk of a rider hitting the ground.

“Oh, I say! Why the devil aren’t you wearing a helmet Crowley?” He rolled over onto his back, and blinked, groaning softly. Aziraphale flipped up his visor, too bright by far in his shining armor. The overcast sky behind him was too much and the serpent squeezed his eyes shut. Spots danced along the blackness. As if he’d stared at the sun.

“Hah-” He turned his head and spat out as much blood as he could. Some of it leaked out and trickled down his cheek along with some spittle. _ Disgusting. There’s no bloody justice in the universe. He shows up a knight in bloody shining armor, and I’m lying in the dirt with mud and blood on my face in utter disgrace. _ (He could almost hear the refrain of a song, but that was probably just the pounding in his skull.) _ Some adversary you turned out to be. _ He let more blood dribble out of his mouth before he spoke again. “Had t’nspire the troops.”

Aziraphale frowned at him from on high. “From down there?”

Somehow this was even more mortifying than War catching him tossed by his own horse.

His head was _ throbbing _ and the angel wasn’t helping. “Yeah,” he tried to summon all his sarcasm and venom, but his traitorous voice was distinctly reedy and lacking. He wondered if it was possible to discorporate from a lack of dignity. “Y’know. ‘The eyes of men are lesser agents of belief than their ears.’”

Crowley’s field of vision narrowed to the purse of the angel’s lips. A pout. “I don’t think that’s what Herodetus said.”

The demon tried to shift his jaw from side to side and he hissed. A pained intake of breath, rather than the snakelike thing that sometimes escaped him. “Close enough,” he ran his tongue along the recently vacated sockets in his gums.

“Can you get up? Do you think you can walk?” The angel dithered on the spot, looking around anxiously. Presumably for more hammer-wielding humans.

It took Crowley a great deal longer to think up an answer to the question that he would have liked.

“Crowley?”

He felt a little more blood trickle from the corner of his mouth. “Could probably crawl. You wanna flip me over?”

The angel made an odd, flustered noise. “I do _ not!_”

It struck Crowley, as it so often did when he lay on the ground like this, that the sky looked like a great, overturned cup. If it weren’t so bright and his skull splitting along the fracture lines so rudely deposited there, he could try and see space.

The smell of metal and oil was suddenly much closer as the sound of an angel dropping down to one knee threatened to finish the job the hammer started. A broken whimper escaped him as white hot lightning flared along the cracks in his bones. He felt armor-clad fingertips gently brush against his neck, “Let me look at you.”

The angel’s hand came to rest on Crolwey’s throat, and he didn’t panic as the metal made contact along his neck. The armor was cold, but not restricting. Crowley’s mind went utterly blank, but maybe that was just the fog of his concussion setting in. The angel held him by the corners of his jaw instead, thumb and index finger exerting pressure at the very curve of the hinging joint to keep him still.

Something funny happened to the angel’s eyes. They shifted, mirroring the sky above, stretching back deep into the recesses of his skull—then farther back still—and Crowley suddenly felt like he was falling into a pair of tunnels made of storm clouds and steel. His stomach lurched, and he felt vaguely ill as he plummeted. Or maybe he was falling up? Going forward? Tumbled about like a die in a cup? It was very like and unlike his Fall so long ago. Not as lonely, but disorienting in a similar way. More grounded in physical sensation.

Crowley fell back into his body from impossibly high above with a thud, but he was whole again. His skull didn’t mind being thrown into the mud. He ran his tongue along his gumline and he was unsurprised to find three perfectly unbroken teeth where blood and root had been. The angel’s hands rested on his knees. Crowley’s throat felt naked and cold. He suddenly couldn’t breathe without the angel’s grip around his neck, his lungs _ burned _ and his blood raced with panic, he was _ drowning_—until he remembered that it was an affectation.

He blinked a few more times, even though he didn’t require that either..

“Ah. Thanks. ‘That’s loads better.” He pushed himself upright, and noticed he was still covered in dirt and blood. He scowled, wiping off his cheek. “Would it have killed you to clean me up while you were stitching my bones back together?”

“Call it penance for your shameful conduct on the field of battle. Letting a mere mortal get the jump on you,” the angel tutted him lightly. “Honestly, it’s your own blood. No need to be squeamish.”

“It’s supposed to stay on the inside. I get it isn’t necessary for us, but it’s not pleasant when it goes places it’s not supposed to.” _ It’s also gross. It’s going to crust on my skin like scales. _

“No,” the angel said the words faintly. “No I suppose it isn’t.” It looked like the blood under the angel’s skin was both rushing to and draining from his face all at once, leaving red and white blotches all over it. He cleared his throat, and started the less than elegant process of getting back to his feet.

“So, playing the avenging angel, hm? What would Heaven think?” _ Thank you _ was what a decent person would say, but that’s so far removed from what Crowley is, it was out of the question. Instead he needled the angel. Resuming the natural order of things.

“That I was executing a masterful pincer movement with my forces.” Aziraphale started adjusting and righting his spotless tabard as soon as he was back on his feet. “Any temporary reprieve for the forces of darkness was an entirely incidental and unintentional side-effect. The unpredictability and randomness of War.”

Crowley couldn’t stave off a shudder. “Don’t bring her into it.” He could almost feel her eyes on the back of his neck. A red raven waiting to pick his bones clean.

Aziraphale gave him a cool sweep of his eyes, regarding him as though he were an unfathomable creature. “Thought you rather enjoyed her company. Given all you’ve got up to here.” Crowley blinked, and he glanced down at his abandoned sword, coated now in mud and guts. Were they his own? It felt like the angel had properly thwarted him. Stabbed him through whatever counted as intestines for a demon wearing a human skin. His lungs gave a curious, painful shudder.

_ You think I killed them? You think I enjoy this madness? You think I’m the same as any other demon? After all this time? _

Like always, his mouth moved faster than his brain. Out of step. Out of sync.

“I didn’t—”_ Oh. _

Crowley’s newly-reformed teeth clicked as he snapped his jaw shut, swallowing the words he almost spilled, like poison.

_ I didn’t kill anybody. _

Crowley felt his heart plummet like a stone. Good thing it was optional—even if it didn’t _ feel _ like it was optional, at the moment.

He recalled Aziraphale’s scandalized face from when he’d been playing the Black Knight seven hundred years ago, the angel’s voice ringing in his ears, clear as day. _ That would be lying! _

He stood there mutely. Words trapped in his chest, rattling around in his brain. _ I’m not a murderer! I didn’t kill anyone! I’m not a killer! _

He was, in a sense. Just not the way the angel currently thought.

_ Does it make a difference when underneath the circumstances it’s still true? When you strip it down to the bare facts? When you can’t look him in the eye and truthfully say the words ‘I’ve never killed anyone before’? _

The demon looked down at his hands. _ What can I say? That I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known? I did do it! No taking back that one. Just like the Fall. One way voyage. _

Crowley shook his head, feeling defenseless. “I didn’t seek her out by choice. Never liked her. Big coward me—snake thing. Better one-on-one in a dark alley than on a battlefield.” _ Probably shouldn’t let it slip to the Enemy that I haven’t killed anything since Eden. That I never wanted to. _ Could the angel _ understand? _

Crowley wasn’t always certain even he did. Morals were tricky to figure out, without knowing the difference between Good and Evil. He envied humans just a little bit. _ Must be nice and simple for them. _For Crowley it involved a lot of comparative studies. Rather like learning to find cheats and clues to navigate life with one eye and a lack of depth perception.

The shredded remains of his stomach flipped, and he had an even worse thought. That Aziraphale would _ understand _ in the way that only angels could. Of _ course _he wouldn’t judge Crowley for killing.

_ We were made before that rule was written in stone. _ He was a demon, wasn’t he? _ Am I not an emissary of Evil on this Earth? _ Isn’t that what his lot did? What demons were meant for and created for? He felt bile burning at the back of his throat. He couldn’t rule out the possibility it was his own venom. _ How could he blame me for following my purpose? For following the Great, bloody, Ineffable Plan? _ The thought was bitter on the back of his tongue and he glared upwards.

Aziraphale seemed surprised. “Oh…”

Crowley shrugged, “It’s just work.” He bent down to pick up the sword. When he stood the blade and his body were spotless again.

He didn’t feel clean.

“You here for the long haul or just one battle?” He glanced at Aziraphale from the corner of his eyes.

“Depends on how this one goes.” The angel shifted in place uncomfortably, “If this is… decisive then it will be over.”

“You with the pagans or the Catholics or…?” Crowley wouldn’t have been shocked to discover they were fighting on the same side. _ Could have stayed home if that’s true. _

“I don’t know. I’m not sure _ they _ know who all they’re with,” the angel stared down at the cloth covering his armor. It was devoid of any human heraldry. Beholden to either Heaven or Good.

“Ah, they do. Don’t worry.” Crowley smiled bitterly, a faint ache in his chest. He stared upwards again, looking past the clouds into the depths of space. Pushing past the brightness. At a far flung star pulling a gas giant closer and closer to destruction. At a hundred thousand moons drifting off or crashing into surfaces. _ S’what you get for treating them like an afterthought. (Like sprinkles.) Was never your department, but you had to stick your fingers in anyway. Anything for the aesthetic. _

“Will you be staying long?”

Crowley thought of the little rituals that were being slowly stamped out or re-purposed. The deviances and variety that made life richer and more interesting. Of midsummer moons and midwinter stars and how many festivals and monuments a hundred generations of humans and half as many again had synced to the movements of the sky.

“Until the work is done,” Crowley said, pulling his gaze away from the dome overhead.

“Right, well,” the angel stood awkwardly. He glanced in the direction his unit had gone. “Suppose we’ll see each other again. Hopefully not too soon.” Aziraphale stuttered, “I-er, I didn’t mean- That is to say, perhaps under better circumstances,” the angel tried to wring his hands, but that proved noisy and difficult in armor.

Crowley noted that neither of them had brought up The Arrangement. Usually that was his job. ‘Be easier if one of us goes home. No point in both of us being up here. Oh let’s toss for it and see if we can’t make it decisive then, and you can get on with the rest of your decade back in the Duchy of Saxony or wherever you decided to kip. Good beer country, I hear.’

“Need a hand up?” Crowley nodded towards the horse. It seemed much more gentle than anything Hell had ever sent him.

“Oh-! That’s very kind of you.”

_ Don’t say that. I’m not kind. _ “Not the sort of thing one should be saying to a demon. Just balancing the scales out. That’s all. Didn’t think I’d get out of this with my pretty smile intact.” He bent down, cupping his hands in the groove of his thigh. The horse flicked an ear, but a trampling didn’t seem imminent. _ You better do a better job of protecting him from the likes of me in the future. They aren’t all as slothful as me. _

It was easier than it would have been for a mortal, but the angel seemed to appreciate the boost all the same.

“Do be more careful, my dear fellow. It’d be awfully…” Aziraphale trailed off, then he steeled himself and sat up a bit taller in the saddle. “That is to say, it would feel a lot more empty without my longest-standing adversary around. Winning wouldn’t be the same.”

Crowley let out a laugh, despite himself. “No shallow victories for you, hm?”

“Indeed.” Aziraphale gave him an answering smile, but then his face shifted. Slowly, subtly, it became something sad. _ Orbital decay_.

The angel’s hand went to his sword.

_ I’ve been wondering, d’you think being Good is the same as being kind? _ They were words slurred over an amorpha of wine. Lifetimes ago. Accompanied by a puff of air against his arm from where the angel’s head lay on the table. _ Sometimes they seem to be the same, and sometimes it seems being Good makes people very unhappy. And not nice at all. _

Aziraphale frowned down at him, and Crowley didn’t know what was going on behind those eyes that looked nothing at all like the sky. They were wholly of earth. All green and brown and blue. Folds and fissures of tiny textures like painted canyons, flecks of color like rolling islands, and ribbons like rivulets threaded through each iris.

He didn’t leave his body. Not like before, but he felt a bit lost in them all the same. It wasn’t enough. Crowley leaned forward. Ignoring the bells shrieking at the back of his skull that he would crash and burn if he tried to take this plunge.

_ Why can’t I fall into them? I did it before. _

He was supposed to be good at it. Falling. It defined his very existence.

The angel’s hand twitched, sword unsheathing an instant later. His pulse pounded in his ears like hoofbeats against mud, drowning out everything else. His whole body was tense, ready to break apart, and he didn’t _ care _ if he chased Icarus’ sad, sad fate. He would gladly have his orbit decay to the point of collision. End in earth instead of ocean.

Or sulphur.

Instead, the angel merely lifted his sword in a salute and spurred his horse forward with his heels, leaving Crowley behind, lungs frozen mid-breath. And shouldn’t a proper demon have been worried about being beheaded by his Opposition?

He felt oddly bereft.

Was this mercy?

It wasn’t gentle. It felt nothing like a hand against his throat.

_ Why does mercy feel like being dropped from a great height? _

Slowly, he gathered his wits about him. Carefully gathering his confusion, his crushed spirits, dissatisfaction, and disappointment before shoving it all aside into a mental box he could chuck deep into the trenches of the ocean. Into the vacuum of space. Crowley declared his work done, and he started trekking south.****

**[Florence - 1348 (Are We Really Not Even Halfway Through the 14th Century Yet?)]**

In his secret heart of hearts, secret from even himself, Crowley felt that the Flood was preferable to this. Of course there’d already been more floods, quite recently too, but that was besides the point.

The one constant about humanity was that everyone thought they were living through the end times. Maybe it was some sort of intergenerational trauma carried as the result of being kicked out of the garden.

_ They have a point. _ Crowley conceded, despite knowing the Antichrist hadn't been born yet. Or if he had, no one Downstairs had bothered to let him know that the timetable had been moved up. Maybe it had. Crowley would've believed it.

For one thing, he’d seen an awful lot of the Horsemen this century. Couldn’t go more than a few months without tripping over War or Famine. Crowley wasn’t keen on crossing paths with Death, and Death must have felt the same because he barely saw more than the other’s shadow. And for the last bloody year and a half there was Pestilence—miasmic fingers carding over southern Europe, the northern shores of Africa, and beyond with no signs of slowing his reach.

Hell for that matter, Crowley had caught Pestilence and Famine promenading arm in arm more than once. The former wooing the latter with deaths so plentiful no one could reap the harvest. And hadn’t it been so sweet of Famine to set the stage and weaken the population to begin with? Flirt. Crowley had seen them sharing a set of empty plates for dinner in Constantinople (or was it Istanbul?) one figure dark and angular, almost skeletal—satiated with suffering and ravenous at the same time—and his fellow non-diner pale and corpulent. Covered in tumors and bloated with fluids and humors. The demon felt wildly uncomfortable at the sight of it and slinked away before either could take notice of him.

It felt like he was being mocked, but then this whole century was starting to have that feeling to it. His whole existence, even.

All this was to say that, even though the man had been long dead, Crowley found himself thinking about Jephthah quite a lot, and wondered if perhaps he was, in some small ineffable way, to blame for all of this.

_ I don’t remember saying anything about Your Horseman. Did I say that? It was implied, at best, with the whole Great Plan dig. _

“You didn’t actually have to _ do _ Your worst,” he mumbled under his breath. Crowley sat on the floor of a tavern, empty bottle clutched in hand. It had been empty when he got here, but he could fill it again with a thought.

There was a family dying upstairs. He was supposed to tempt them into giving their souls to Hell before they perished. He was slacking off, getting drunk instead. His wool chausses had gotten a hole in them somewhere in his travels, just inside his right knee. He picked at the edge of it absently, putting off the trip up the stairs. He wasn't sure if the rest of his clothes were any better off. He was fairly certain his wardrobe was a whirlwind tour of Europe. Spanish hood, pointed and dangling well past his shoulder blades. A tiny silver serpent winding around the capelet. He was mostly certain the tunic was Italian. Unnecessary surcoat from Germany. The shoes… he couldn't remember where he's pinched the style from, but he was proud of the little snake spurs at his ankles. They played off the pointed toes particularly well. He’d just been shuffled around so much, he couldn’t recall how many borders he’d crossed in the last two weeks alone—couldn’t remember where he was supposed to _ go _ after this; it was impossible to keep up with what he was supposed to look like.

There was the sound of a horse outside, and the taste of disease ripe and heavy on the air. Then he heard the unmistakable thud of eighty-odd stone of horseflesh falling to the ground. He felt a surge of undemonic pity for the beast. _ I know they’re badly designed and all, being hard on the buttocks and running around on their stupid finger-legs, but that wasn’t called for. Arsehead. _ Crowley had always cleared out when Pestilence came calling before, decades past. Now he was inescapable.

Part of him thought long and hard about going outside and engaging in a bout of fisticuffs with the pale Horseman, but the cosmic fear in his bones kept him inside. Propelled him up the stairs. Half-scampering, half-slithering.

He’d never been so _ tired _ before in his long life. Overworked. There was so much work, in fact, that he wasn’t the only demon on the face of the earth for once. He knew Aziraphale wasn’t alone either. Worse than the Horseman. One couldn’t go ten feet without bumbling into another demon or angel. There were minor skirmishes, of course, but mostly everyone was too busy trying to snap up souls for their side to really get into a tussle—though Crowley _ had _ seen at least three fistfights between Heavenly agents as they tried to claim some poor wretched soul from a miserable pile of flesh beneath them. (Like car salesmen chasing a commission bonus.) Not that his lot was much better.

Crowley knew he was near the bottom of the leaderboards, as if he minded. It wasn’t really _ hard _ work in that he had to _ do _ anything. At this point the pain and hysteria of humanity meant that they’d sell their soul to anyone and anything that promised to save them. No. Getting them to sign over their souls wasn’t the hard bit. Probably couldn’t have stopped them if he _ wanted _ to.

Crowley pushed open the first door, and he didn’t even flinch at the sight of the bed-ridden human, sweaty with fever and covered in dark, angry buboes. He’d seen so many already. He tried not to take in too many details like the color of the man’s eyes or hair or the cut of his jaw.

_ “Please. Mercy.” _ Crowley could see one of the buboes at the juncture of the man’s neck and shoulder had already split. Or maybe had been let in the guise of treatment. Poor bastard. Not long for this world. _ “Are you an angel of the Lord?” _

_ Don’t insult me. _ He laughed, despite himself. Despite the fact it was not the first time he’d been asked the very same question, under the very same circumstances. “No.” He pulled up a stool and sat at the man’s bedside. He meant to leave the answer there but he couldn’t resist adding, “Not recently, anyway.”

The human was, perhaps, too delirious to be afraid. Too much in pain. Crowley _ looked _ and he saw the sands of his metaphorical hourglass counting down. Two days at most. He saw more than he intended as he saw him punch his brother in the jaw at the age of sixteen. His unbridled joy holding his newborn daughter. The very first time he rode a horse. His mother teaching him to tie his laces. Crowley shook his head to dispell the visions. He usually only saw their lives flash before their eyes when death was immediately imminent. And only when he _ looked. _

_ “Can you help me? Doctor?” _

“Do I look like I run an apothecary?” Crowley sat back, crossing his arms petulantly. The words didn’t feel quite right off his tongue. Like he should be saying something else.

_ “Help me, please, I’ll do anything.” _ Ah. The magic words all demons hope for. Only they didn’t bring Crowley any joy in this place. They made him unhappy.

“Sign here,” he said brusquely, producing a document and pen out of the ether.

_ “Please, help me. I’m dying.” _A surprisingly fierce hand gripped the front of his surcoat, crushing the head of the embroidered snake there.

“I know,” Crowley tried to be soothing. He felt like he was failing at it. The pen trembled in his hand, and the contract wavered at one corner as if it was thinking about vanishing from existence. “I can’t help unless you sign this.”

Crowley wasn’t sure whose hand shook more violently as the human grasped the pen. His fingertips were already blackened, but Crowley knew it wasn’t ink. These stains came from beneath the skin. The man who loved his daughter so much and had once fought with his brother and once hadn’t known how to tie his own laces made three broad strokes at the paper. Nothing like a name but close enough for Hell’s books. Binding.

“Right, thank you for the transaction-”

_ “Kill me.” _

“Don’t be dramatic,” Crowley spat, disgusted. It was almost an unfamiliar feeling now. Pestilence had him well and numb to it.

_ “You promised to help. It hurts." _Why didn’t this get any easier?

“Didn’t say anything about killing you, did I?”

The man’s eyes blazed bright, forehead slick with sweat. _ “I’m already dead, am I not? Kill me.” _ Crowley turned his head aside. The hand buried in his surcoat gave him a shake so hard his teeth clacked together. “_Kill me damn you!” _Another shake.

_ Oh You bastard. _ He looked up, tears prickling his eyes. Safely hidden from view behind dark lenses. He shook his head without looking. The human wailed, and the hand finally unclenched.

_ “Please, mercy.” _

Crowley laughed wetly. “My department isn’t known for mercy.”

_ “Help, please. You promised help. I just want to die. I want it all to stop.” _The whisper was as cracked as the skin on the sore that had split open.

He pressed a small bottle into the man’s hand. “Drink a dram of this with your next meal. It’ll help.

_ “Please, can’t you just kill me instead?” _

He considered the man. The room was heavy with pain and suffering. Practically a miasma. His time on Earth was already so short. Would a day or two really make a difference? _ Makes a difference to him. _Then he considered it again.

_ Makes a difference to me. _

Crowley shook his head _ no _ again.

“Remember: one dram, and one dram _ only_.” The bottle held four. If the man overdosed and his body was too compromised to survive it, well… Crowley wasn’t responsible for that.

_ “Is God so cruel? Is the Devil?” _

“Yes and yes, just different flavors of it,” Crowley answered, getting to his feet. He had three other souls to account for. He headed for the door.

_ “Why?” _

The Word was like a lance, and he stumbled, clutching the doorframe. _ Isn’t that the question? The. Question. _ It hurt. An ache a million light-years old. A scar a million light-years long. Then he was _ angry_. Saltpeter thrown on fire.

_ Are You fucking mocking me? _

His anger burned itself out as quickly as it came. Something broken and awful and full of sorrow tried to claw its way up his throat. He felt so _ hollow. _

“Sorry.”

_ “What did I do to deserve this?” _ He shouldn’t have this much in common with a seven-eighths dead human.

“Dunno. Could’ve been anything really. Questions. Actions. Associations. Nothing in particular.” He squeezed the frame of the door.

_ “Whatever it was, whatever I did, I didn't mean it.” _ He sounded so _ desperate_. Crowley remained rooted to the spot.

“I-” his voice was too high. It squeaked like an old wagon wheel before cracking and pitching low and hoarse. Like he was subject to the mortifyingly human ordeal of puberty. “I know.”

_ “Forgive me?” _

He'd never felt more like a demon.

"Not possible."

_ “Please.” _ The word was so soft and so broken. A prayer.

He hadn’t asked to be a demon anymore than he’d asked to be the Angel of Death.

_ I don't answer prayers. Not in the job description. _

“Drink your goddamn mandrake juice,” Crowley growled and he slammed the door shut behind him.

It was going to be a long day.

**[Florence - Three Hours Closer to the End of the Fourteenth Century]**

His long day only got longer.

The sun was low in the sky, throwing long shadows about carelessly. He gave Pestilence’s late horse a wide berth as he left the tavern. Three souls for his side. Three notches on his belt. _ Eugh. Poor choice of metaphor that. _One had valiantly resisted his foul temptations. Rather, Crowley had not tried very strenuously to lure the man's beloved daughter to hellfire and damnation after her barely there refusal.

In the next house there was the familiar, cloying scent of ozone, lilacs, and smug-self righteousness that heralded an angelic presence. Well, Presence. He could taste lightning on his tongue and it seared its way down his throat, into his stomach. He could hear trumpets and swans. _ Fuck swans. Just fancy ducks with giraffe necks thinking they’re so much better than everyone else. _

For this sort of capital ‘P’ Presence, it meant somebody important. Crowley was about to leg it in the opposite direction, but almost subsumed by that Presence he felt something familiar. Something wonderful. A far-off thunder that soothed the scalding burn of his lightning-torn esophagus. The smell of fertile soil, bird nests and fallen chicks returned to safety. The sound of oyster shells cracking open and rain on white wings. The taste of old ashes, the memory of heat, and well-oiled iron that was both somehow as sharp as snow and sweet as spring. A comforting hand closed around the hilt of a sword, or perhaps Crowley’s throat. For the most fleeting moment the demon wasn’t surrounded by Death and Pestilence and War and Famine, but he was in a cocoon of safety, a promise of protection, a hushed and hallowed library.

Then he was in Florence again, surrounded by the awful ugliness of reality and returning to it was _ painful. _ The stench of rot and disease made his stomach rebel, and he had to curb the insurrection viciously. His joints ached and strained, as if they wanted to be gone and something else.

He considered giving in and turning into a snake, but he decided against it. His hearing wasn’t the best as a wyrm. Instead he rounded a corner and found himself standing on the roof. He hastily flattened himself down, creeping silently to the edge of the tiles. He didn’t waste a miracle on making himself invisible to humans. Humans rarely looked up under normal circumstances, and given the general climate of disillusionment with the Almighty they were even less likely to do so now.

He peeked over the edge of the roof, through the grimy windowpane. There was Aziraphale. Crowley shook his head in quiet despair that the angel _ still _ had not taken his fashion advice to heart. The angel was still dressed like a Saxon from last century, a long, pale, almost-blue tunic coming down to his knees. Tiny white galanthus embroidered at the hem. He’d picked up some new shoes, at least, with a modest, modern point. 

Michael's outfit was… strange and basically confirmed Crowley's suspicion that the archangel had never even looked at a human being before this awful century. Michael had donned some odd combination of a queen's regalia and a jester's outfit. All draping sleeves, dramatic points, fringe, tiny bells, and layers. Severe white and silver that hurt to look at, and would have blinded a mere mortal. Ice and starlight. Vigilant and unyielding. A hidden army of holy lances glittered underneath the train of Michael's cape. Like a canopy of stars but less homely. The longer he looked the more dizzying it became and the image of a hundred wings burned into Crowley's retinas. He felt the urge to grovel, to confess his litany of sins. He wanted to be crushed and ground to dust under the glacial Presence of the archangel and give thanks for it. The fractal patterns of Severity and Righteousness spread over Michael’s cheeks like silverleaf. One fragment of Righteousness refracted the waning light of day into Crowley’s forehead and he was _ falling_, tumbling over and over never reaching the ground, despite the painful dig of ceramic tiles against his palms. No. Not falling. Falling. Cast out. Broken in twain. Sliced apart from nethers to nasal passage; each lung gasping and each eye trying to comprehend the the growing, twisting, judgmental mountaintop towering over the pit he’d been thrown into. He couldn’t hear his own two-throated, split-tongue screaming over the sounding of a hundred carillons, the clap of each bell breaking him apart. The glass-sharp chime of feathers rustling against each other cut through the unbearably deep resonance of platinum bells. In short:

Michael was terrifying.

“-So lovely to see you.” Ah good. He hadn’t missed anything interesting yet. Aziraphale stood in front of the archangel, twisting the ring on his pinky behind his back. “To-to what do I owe the pleasure?” The principality gave his superior the exact sort of smile that Crowley had ignored for years before it stopped being levied in his direction altogether. The smile that _ looked _ pleased, but the raised tilt of his eyebrows secretly said: _ please remove yourself from my sight as quickly as possible; I have enough to be getting on with, thank you. _

“I think you know why I’m here Aziraphale, Angel of the Eastern Gate.” The barest lift of Michael’s eyebrow was like a sword being raised. Hovering over the principality’s neck and Crowley didn’t like it one bit.

He could _ see _ Aziraphale suppress the urge to squirm in place. Crowley could taste blood in his mouth, real and bitter, as he realized that wasn’t the only thing the angel was suppressing. Aziraphale’s angelic radiance had been tucked away like his wings. Like a sword in a sheath. Then tucked in a trunk and stuffed under a bed. Then boarded up behind the door where one could conveniently forget that sword had been given away ages ago. If he could tuck his wings into a sub-plane within the other plane they were stowed in, Crowley was willing to bet Aziraphale would have done it.

It let Michael’s awful Presence advance on the ground Aziraphale’s had withdrawn from. It didn’t _ have _ to feel like that. Didn’t have to feel like a war game, a martial act, even though both angels were made for swords. Cast in iron and steel. They were made of love too, supposedly. Michael’s metaphorical and metaphysical presence took another step forward and Crowley’s teeth ached and his blood boiled with impotent fury as he saw Aziraphale’s equally non-tangible, incomprehensible footwork falter back another step. Further within himself.

“I, I don’t know what you’re talking about, really! If there’s something wrong I-I’d be more than happy to-to look into it. I know I haven’t been doing a lot of, of _ thwarting _ lately, but it was my understanding that we were putting the kibosh on that until this…” Aziraphale made a circular sort of gesture at their surroundings. (It made Crowley think of a DJ with a turntable.) “All this is all sorted out.”

The twitch of Michael’s brow was deadly. (Like the fall of a guillotine blade.) Across the city Crowley felt the utter obliteration of wicked souls, and heard the curses of his cohorts as visions of infernal bonuses slipped through their fingers.

Aziraphale stammered, “I, really, there was no need for you to come down, Most Holy Archangel Michael. I-I have everything well in-” Michael’s crocidolite eyes—which had never shed so much as a crocodile tear—silenced Aziraphale like a sword to the throat.

“Clearly, there was. I’m not in the habit of wasting my time. Infinite though it may be.” Crowley could _ hear _ the silent, supplicating _ no, of course not _ from the lower ranked angel. “Good Right Principality Aziraphale, Angel of the Eastern Gate. By my count you have let no less than a quarter of the souls assigned to you from this plague stray from the Gates of Pearl into Hell, Limbo, and other places Unknown to the sight of the Holy Host."

Crowley almost missed the mutter of _ barely a drop in the bucket. _

Michael let out a sigh. A deep, sharp rustle of arctic wind through a canyon. "Really, Aziraphale. You've got to be more careful, or we'll be forced to take corrective measures."

"Corrective measures, Your Eminence?" Aziraphale twisted the ring so hard, Crowley marvelled that he hadn't popped off his own pinky.

"We will have to put a limit on your miracles if you ledgers don't improve, o dear Holy tutelary."

Crowley shuddered and a wave of nausea almost pitched him off the roof. He couldn’t imagine going through this cataclysm without miracles. Or with a strict drip-feed of miracles that meant he couldn’t get pissed whenever the fuck he wanted. Which was constantly.

There was something rather mortal in the pallor that washed over Aziraphale’s face. Refreshingly corporeal in the face of all the exposure to Divine Radiance. The principality’s mouth made stammering motions, but no sound came out.

The arcangel’s Presence glittered harshly, blinding like sunlight on snow. Michael smiled eir frozen river smile, “I’m glad you’re finally understanding the seriousness of this.”

Aziraphale said something. Crowley couldn’t hear it, just the faintest brush of his voice on the air. It turned out he didn’t have to.

The archangel’s head reeled back, mouth open and there was nothing but pearly white teeth and teeth and _ teeth _ bared in a not-smile and a dark, circular abyss to swallow evil. _ “MERCY!?” _ The word echoed to the very borders of the sea. An awful sound, full of anger and amusement. Delight and disgust that filled every shadow in the room, bled outwards and made the foundation of the Roman roads across the continent groan.

Atop the roof, Crowley flinched. He felt bruises coil around his form, and he was fairly certain three of his ribs cracked. Like he’d been bound to an altar and then run over by chariots. _ Twat. Wanker. Arsehat. Showoff. Prick. _Crowley breathed through his teeth, vision swimming with pain.

The attic seemed to grow to accommodate Michael’s form, which loomed over Aziraphale like the Tower of Babel. The archangel was bent in half, barely keeping it together. Bells and bellows shook the rafters.“Is it MERCY that they are denied their RIGHTFUL PLACE in PARADISE? Is it MERCY when they go to HELL? When they pledge their SOULS to some PAGAN pantheon? You’ve got to think LONG TERM Aziraphale! ETERNITY is at stake! ARMAGEDDON could be at stake!”

The principality seemed very small indeed. No bigger than a dove. Dwarfed in the presence of a wrathful, holy Goliath. Still, the angel dared to look up and meet the archangel’s terrible gaze. No trace of penitence on his face. Somehow, he didn’t disintegrate into ash. Steel backing every fiber of the angel’s being. The demon held his breath.

“Right. Of course. I won’t let you down, Most Holy Archangel Michael.” Crowley felt his stomach drop clean through to the center of the earth in disappointment. _ What did you expect? Glorious Rebellion: Part Two (Electric Boogaloo)? _ What else could an angel say? What could _ anyone _ say in the face of _ that_?

Michael smiled again, moonlight on snowbanks. The slash of teeth only approached comfort because it was softer than what had come before. Eir Presence lazily circled inward. An iceberg following eddies in the ocean. “Of course you won’t. You don’t have a choice. Sweet, innocent tutelar.” Only an archangel could take a Virtue like innocence and pronounce it in such a way to frame it like a failing. “We may have to give you firmer guidance in the future, I think, to avoid such happenings again. It wouldn’t do for you to forget Our Love.” Another smile, full of icicles hanging from a cathedral roof. Beautiful and dangerous. “It’s so good that you’ve held onto your innocence throughout this, Good Right Principality Aziraphale. That your time on Earth hasn’t corrupted you. I’m sure you meant well, but misplaced mercy isn’t part of the Plan.” The demon gave an involuntary, sympathetic shudder as Michael pronounced the word _ corrupted_. He felt like a basin of liquid nitrogen had been poured over him. Trying to scour his insides.

Michael’s words were a left hand in a gauntlet squeezing a still-beating heart. A silver spear manifested in eir right hand. Or perhaps it was a scepter, or a thurible. “Love without Guidance, without a Plan, is no use to the universe at all. There is no Place for it. We must all live by Her example.”

Crowley felt oddly thankful for Hell’s straightforward way of doing things. A hundred years of torture and Sisyphean paperwork would be easier to sort out than… this. Then he felt vaguely sick he was thankful for it.

Part of him wondered what Hell would look like if they had the Left Hand of God in the ranks of the Fallen.

“I look forward to proving myself capable of enacting the Almighty’s wishes and enacting Her Plans on Earth. It won’t happen again,” the principality’s head was bowed. Surrendering to the victorious general. Aziraphale’s hands were clasped as though in prayer.

“So let it be Written, so let it be Done.” There was one last brilliant, vertical flare of incomprehensible light, and the archangel Rose like a terrible, holy comet. Aziraphale crashed to the floor with an undignified yelp.

Crowley finally let out a groan, the pain returning to him. He felt awful, inside and out. He cautiously touched a hand to his ribcage and hissed. Yup. Definitely broken. He took shallow breaths, working up the strength to miracle himself back into shape.

Then he thought about it, and snapped, falling through the roof and landing in a suddenly conveniently placed, empty bed. The frame snapped under the sudden gravity-assisted weight as he came into contact with the mattress. “_Gwoaaah-oh-ho-ho!… ohhhh_. Right. That was a mistake.” The pain was awful, but in some strange way good. Somehow made him feel drunker than booze. _ Oh is that how drunk is supposed to feel like? I’d forgotten. _ Maybe he was just delirious. _ Nice. _

“Crowley!” Aziraphale didn’t seem nearly as surprised as he should be. Or maybe the angel was just too exhausted to be surprised. He did sound a bit angry though. Pity he’d given away that sword. “You should have healed yourself first oh you stupid… Let me-” the angel started to crawl over to the sad little mattress.

“Are you _ mad!? _ Give me a minute and I’ll _ get _ to it. You heal me up and Michael’ll probably turn Florence into a crater just to prove a point. _ Fuck!_” Crowley drew in a labored, heavy breath, pressing his face into whatever passed for a mattress in this miserable, God-forsaken century. _ Allegedly _ God-forsaken. Who knew which option was worse.

There was probably something to be said about negative attention from Heaven.

He didn’t have to look to see the pout on Aziraphale’s face. He heard the stretch of bones and tendons as the angel flexed his hands uselessly. “But you’re _ hurt. _ Oh, _ why _ were you eavesdropping you stupid serpent! What if Michael had smited you?”

Crowley let out a snort that wreaked havoc in his chest, “One: demon. Two: pretty sure it’s smote.”

“It’s the past participle use, you absolute _ dullard.” _ Aziraphale’s face looked so _ endearing _ all screwed up in anger like that. How strange.

“That’s _ smitten. _”

“Crowley!” The demon laughed, and it _ hurt_. It hurt but underneath the pain there was an ache, like muscles making their presence known after exercise. The pain was almost worth it to feel that ache. Almost.

“You going to keep insulting me like that?” Crowley turned his head towards Aziraphale with a sly grin. Or grimace. It was meant to be a grin. “Hurts my feelings. And I was right, you know. Not every day I get to one-up you over grammar.”

“I will as long as you keep _ stupidly not-healing yourself, _ after _ stupidly _ dropping your corporation from height, after _ stupidly _ skulking about in the blast-radius of an archangel. And fine.” Aziraphale crossed his arms, the tiniest waves of righteous indignation licking along his shoulders, “What if you’d been smitten by Michael?”

“Blegh,” Crowley’s face wrinkled automatically. _ Not the angel I want to be smitten by. (With.) Huh? _ The demon felt distressingly sober and confused. _ Wha-? What's that supposed to mean?_ Without the drunken side-effects and that ache the pain didn’t feel nearly so useful. He felt dizzy, like he was tumbling off the roof again. Except he hadn’t. Exactly.

Crowley snapped his fingers and he was able to breathe again. The bruises from invisible chains were gone. He relaxed bonelessly into the ruined bed.

“Your boss is an absolute knobhead.”

“Crowley!” The angel gasped out his name, deliciously scandalized. “You can’t just call the Almighty a-a _ knobhead." _Aziraphale hissed the last word, and whipped his head wildly about, as if he expected agents of Heaven and/or Hell to drag him away to the sulfur pools where angels could be baptized and born anew.

Crowley felt a very odd sort of smile creep along his face. If he weren’t a demon, one could call it tender. But he _ was _ a demon, so it wasn’t. Tender.

“I meant Michael.” The warm feeling in his chest was just the innate kernel of hellfire and damnation all demons held. No other reason. His voice just sounded the way it did because he was comfortable and tired enough to take a thousand year nap.

But then he would have missed the angel clapping a hand over his mouth, looking upwards with a muffled yelp of distress.

Crowley felt that smile grow bigger, exposing his teeth. Regular, non-distressing-hopefully-charming teeth. “I didn’t say anything about the Almighty, angel. Tsk tsk. Feeling dissatisfied with our lot, as of late? Feeling _ blasphemous?_”

A bright red flush colored Aziraphale’s face. Like a child had scrawled all over it with cinnabar.

“W-well you said—strictly speaking, Michael is not my direct superior.” The angel was trying to de-fluster himself and failing admirably.

Crowley curled his lip, “Told you off like one though, hm?”

Aziraphale looked extremely offended, but Crowley was reasonably certain he was just embarrassed. “Come off it, angel. Everyone gets chewed out by Head Office now and again.”

The angel just pursed his lips, still looking stern and not at all comforted. The angel’s eyes blazed with the unspoken words ‘_I don’t_.’ The stakes had never felt as high as this in the past year and a half while he’d been trying to soothe someone. What was one mortal soul compared to his companionship and professional entanglement with Aziraphale? _ Well, I fucking tried. Guess it’s just my bedside manner. Bloody awful. _

“Right, look, forget I said anything. Let’s meet up later. Outside town. Get away from all this. Just for a bit.” It had been a long time since Florence was a mere town, but they could remember it.

He watched the angel consider the offer. He was worried, for a moment, that the angel was too upset to agree to it, that he’d have to go off and bear the weight of the rest of this awful year, and every year after, alone. But then-

“Fine. I’ll find you.” Crowley would have sagged with relief if he weren’t already pooled into a bag of bones.

“Right. Talk later.” He let his eyes fall shut. Just for a moment.

“You better not sleep the week away,” the angel warned.

“I’ll be there. I promise.” He’d figure out where _ there _ was later. He stayed awake just long enough to hear the angel leave the room, then there was darkness.

**[A Hill Outside Florence - Several hours later, after sunset]**

While there weren’t seven of them, there were hills outside of Florence. Crowley had managed not to sleep through the rest of the century. He hadn’t even slept through the rest of the night. Just a couple hours. Barely a nap.

The only noise was the multitude of insects, mostly crickets, straining to make their presence known so that they could fulfill their inborn imperative to be fruitful and multiply. Crowley didn’t spare a thought for the Fallen angel who had crafted their blueprints.

The empty bottle from earlier was still clutched in his hand. Every now and then he brought it to his lips and swallowed. The summer air was warm enough he pulled his ridiculous hood back a few inches to expose his hairline. It was the perfect temperature, in Crowley’s opinion.

He stared up at the stars. Humans could only see their ghosts, but Crowley could still see them as they were _ now _ in real time, intermingled with their shadows, and … oh. The blaze of light from Casseopia’s supernova was still rushing towards earth. Something to look forward to then. In a century or two.

He’d forgotten there were things worth looking forward to.

Eventually, he heard footsteps, and the shape of Aziraphale lit up the night with glorious heat for just a moment. _Oh._ _Huh._ _Guess I was looking forward to this too._ He stared at the angel. Stunned by this minor revelation. A smile curled the demon’s lips before he could stop it.

“Glad you could make it,” he grinned into the mouth of the bottle. He felt drunk again. Or buzzed.

“Hmph.” Aziraphale sniffed primly. In the dark Crowley wasn’t sure if he was feigning offense or if he was still genuinely upset.

“Nobody twisted your arm and forced you to come here, you know. Dunno if you’ve heard, but the Almighty invented a little thing called Free Will and set it free on this Her-forsaken planet.” Sometimes being a bit of a bastard worked on the angel. Especially when there was blasphemy involved.

He took it as an encouraging sign when the angel dropped down on the ground beside him. A moment later the angel was stiffly half-reclined, resting on one elbow.

“Drink?” Crowley offered the bottle to the angel. The angel reached out, then bent closer to examine the glass.

“This bottle is empty,” Aziraphale frowned at it, as though it had personally offended him.

“Yup.” Crowley held his arm out, still extended. Their fingers didn’t touch as he passed it over. He wasn’t sure why he noticed that. The angel considered it for a moment and then took the bottle and raised it to his lips, swallowing audibly before passing it back. Still empty.

The demon tried not to think of empty dinner plates in Istanbul. Constantitnople. Whatever.

He could feel where the angel’s lips had transferred heat to the rim of the glass. Crowley let his mouth cover those traces, and he chugged on nothing but air, pulling away after the seventh constriction of his throat muscles.

He felt himself get a little drunker anyway, and he sensed Aziraphale uncoiling just a little too. They didn’t need alcohol anymore than they needed food. Frankly, Crowley thought he might go off food for the next hundred years. Strictly speaking, they didn’t need the bottle either. It was just more fun to get pissed the old-fashioned way, but tonight Crowley couldn’t stomach the thought of it. He passed the bottle back to the angel who took another pull. He noticed a distinct lack of miracles to change the contents of the bottle into something more liquid, despite Aziraphale’s earlier complaint.

Aziraphale’s gaze was down on the city below. Dark against the skyline. There were still the dots of some lantern lights in the streets. And everyone who could afford it was burning a fire in their home. Crowley kept his gaze fixed upwards on the firmament.

They said nothing for a long time. Just passed the bottle between them, choosing to get drunker and drunker as the minutes rolled by. Some of that delicious Free Will everyone was talking about.

Finally, once he gauged the other to be tipsy enough, Crowley broke the silence.

“So what was all that about then?”

Aziraphale let out a long sigh, and he snatched the bottle from Crowley’s hand. “Why are you asking? You heard the whole thing.”

“Yeah but I don’t, don’t understand it.” He hated the fact that the brow of his corporation wrinkled any time he tried to figure something out. What a stupid, unsightly design. Spoiled all his sharp angles with those rolls. Fuck whoever came up with it. _ Hope they Fell. _Crowley had wished the Fall on others for far pettier reasons.

The angel stared at the bottom of the empty bottle. Crowley wildly hoped he’d find whatever he was looking for in there. There was an expression on his face that was familiar. Only not. He thought of Noah and the flood and a pained nod and a noise of affirmation the angel couldn’t bring himself to say.

Aziraphale’s expression now was both like and unlike that. It was tortured, but he looked _ wretched _in a way he hadn’t back then. Tired and worn down. Something that was supposed to be impossible. Angels were ever-vigilant. Hypervigilant even.

He’d seen Aziraphale grapple with temptation and curiosity before. Crowley happened to specialize in those categories, and he usually delighted in watching the angel struggle, but… not tonight. Not like this. Aziraphale shoved a hand into his pale white curls and for a moment Crowley thought this was all a terrible idea.

The angel finally spoke. And the demon realized that it was quiet all around them. Just the distant singing of the stars. “I've been praying for them to have quick deaths. Is that wrong?”

“This whole thing is wrong,” Crowley said dully.

He reclaimed the bottle. He thought the two of them had made a decent study of the whole Good and Evil thing, but he knew Aziraphale tended to be a little well… He took a lot of what Heaven said at face value.

“So why’d that necessi- nessita- Why’d that piss off Head Office?”

Aziraphale shrugged. “I haven’t been particularly careful or discerning. I’m supposed to have an interest in their Salvation, but I just…” The angel lapsed into silence chewing at his lip. Debating.

Crowley waited.

“It’s just so much,” the angel finally whispered. “They’re in so much _ pain_, and they’re so _ scared_, and all this _ suffering_. I just… I just end it for them. Give them mercy and—God help me— _ I don’t care _ what happens to them after. They could declare an olive grove to be full of Asherah poles for all I care. They could be praying to whatever they had for breakfast, if they had breakfast. I don’t. Care.” The words came out harsh. Hard won through gritted teeth.

Crowley slid the bottle across the ground between them. Aziraphale grabbed it. His expression crumpled, and he looked guilty. Like he should care about the fact he didn’t care. Or… something.

It took a moment for the pieces to fit together in his drunken brain. Oh. _ Ohhhh. _ “So, so, hold up.” He set the bottle on the ground. “You’ve been… how many have you sent our way then?”

“Please don’t ask me that. I have to… I’ll have to do… something going forward. I’ll find a way to fix it.” _ To save them or save yourself? _ Crowley frowned, and his heart softened a moment later. That was an unkind thought. Uncalled for. Besides. Maybe it was both.

“Fine, we’ll start with this. Tell me the number of souls you’re short. Maybe we can work out some sort of Arrangement.”

Aziraphale told him the number.

“Holy hell Aziraphale.” The number sobered him a little. Crowley could understand, in a very abstract sense, why the _ goddamn archangel Michael _ had shown up to go all Old Testament on his ass.

And yet Aziraphale had _ also _ been right. Still a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things. The Great Plan of things.

“I had rather hoped the general devotion we’ve come to count on in this area would sort of… make up for any margin for error.” The angel turned his head away, looking guilty again. “It seems that there’s been a… downturn in the level of faith here.” In their earlier acquaintance the sight of it made his head hurt. Trying to reconcile the picture of a perfectly Sinless being wracked with guilt. Now it was just… Aziraphale. A bit of lived-in experience on Earth probably helped a bit too.

It was the angel’s turn to chug from the bottle.

“Well, I can make some alterations to my style. Truth be told, I don’t have to do more than show up to get folks to sign their souls over to me, so I can do the bare mimin-minimus—I can slack off an’ bar some souls from Hell. People are begging to get in these days. Could do to be more selective.”

“But Crowley, if Hell—”

“Pff. We’re making out like bandits righ’ now. I’ll be fine. I can tell them ‘m working on research into Sloth. ‘Syou we gotta take care of. I’ll help you balance th’ books. Don’ worry. ‘Swhat The Arrangement is for.” It would be easy enough to generate a contract that blocked someone from Hell as one that damned them to it. Getting them to accept Salvation was just a matter of simple Temptation.

Crowley threw himself backwards into the grass, looking up at the sky, trying to see just how far into the universe his sight could go. Not as far as it used to, but still quite far.

The demon let out a sigh. “This is, without a doubt, the worst century to date.”

“It isn’t over yet,” Aziraphale sounded as tired as Crowley felt. “Still have a ways to go.”

“It’s not even… all _this_ that’s the worst bit." He stopped to consider the statement. "It _ is _ the worst, actually, I mean. Let’s not lie, yeah? This is the fucking worst. Floods leading to Famine. Thought She promised. No more flooding. There was a rainbow right? I didn’t dream it, did I?”

“She only promised not to drown everyone again,” the angel reminded him flatly, taking a silent hit from the bottle.

Crowley let out a pained laugh. “Bollocks. Pestilence and War being allowed to run rampant… But it’s not all that. It’s not. That’s just, that’s just _ circumstances. _ Not the worst part.”

“Oh? What’s the worst part?” Aziraphale was doing his best to sound interested, but mostly he sounded as old as the earth. Exhausted. Crowley wasn’t offended in the slightest. He pushed himself upright so quickly he swayed in place, dizzy and drunk.

"It's what they're _ doing _ to each other. It's like _ Lord of the Flies _ out there!" He swept out a hand to encompass Florence and its surrounding villages.

The angel looked around and frowned, puzzled. "Lord Beelzebub? What are they doing out there?"

"Nothing. Well—no idea at the moment," Crowley amended truthfully. "Figure of speech. Or it will be. I think. I don't remember." His forehead wrinkled. Again, not his most attractive feature—and the fact he even _ spared _ a thought for what made him attractive in the middle of all this had Crowley break down laughing. Like a lunatic.

Aziraphale gave him a rather severe and peeved side-eye. “Care to let me in on the joke?” 

"No." _ Absolutely not. _His heart started racing wildly without his permission. “What was I saying again?”

“I think you were getting ready to say something rather depressing about the state of mankind and how abominably they’re treating one another.” Aziraphale started counting on his fingers, “Theft, murder, ethnic cleansing, looting, the abandonment of spouse and child, the Flagellants, the general breakdown of social order. That sort of thing. Did I miss anything?”

He stared at the angel as if he’d never seen him before in his long existence. As if they’d never met before. Like Aziraphale was some entirely new thing in all Creation.

_ “Fuck _ I’m a maudlin drunk!”

“Rather,” Aziraphale said, pressing the bottle into his hand.

Their fingers touched.

Crowley was suddenly stone-cold sober. He’d never been drunk at all over the past five millennia.

If that was a miracle that was a nasty one… but Crowley shut his mouth before he could accuse Aziraphale of anything. He didn’t think the angel did it. Or at least it wasn’t on purpose.

Crowley pushed his glasses up and dragged a hand down his face. “They really love doing awful things to each other. ‘S mad. When are they going to figure out medicine again at least? Some of the stuff they’re trying to-to cure it with is… bloody awful.”

“Frogs seem to be a popular choice for folk medicine,” Aziraphale hummed thoughtfully. The angel was still buzzed then.

“Dunno why they’re so obsessed with their own piss either. And blood and… humors. Hope the frogs are okay. Be sad to loose ‘em. Least the plant stuff makes sense.” He brought the bottle to his lips, just touching his against where Aziraphale’s had been. He didn’t drink.

Aziraphale eyed him suspiciously again. “So are _ you _ behind the rash of mandragora growth then? Trying to make a forest out of the stuff, are we?” The angel paused. “Does it work?”

Crowley shrugs. "Guess so. I got the recipe courtesy of Şerafeddin Sabuncuoğlu. Their lot should really take a page out of his book. Suppose he hasn’t published it yet, though?” Crowley was mildly surprised at the words that fell out of his mouth. It was like that sometimes. He started a sentence without the foggiest idea where it was headed.

"Who?" Aziraphale asked, blinking owlishly.

"Er," Crowley suddenly wasn't sure. The knowledge evaporated like dew in the sun. Like his drunken stupor. "Can't recall now. Damnedest thing." He shook his head, staring at the bottle. He downed another deep swallow, trying to at least meet Aziraphale at his current level of drunkenness. “D’you ever get deja vu?” Crowley rubbed his forehead, trying to smooth the damn wrinkles that appeared there.

“Pardon?” Aziraphale tilted his head, delightfully off-kilter in every way.

“Or maybe it’s the opposite of deja vu? Like you know something that’s… you haven’t experienced it yet, but you know it?”

“I think you just described ordinary, non-inverted deja vu.”

Crowley growled, irritated. “It’s not the same though! It’s… I know it _ before _ the deja vu hits. It’s there, and then it’s gone, usually, but I already knew it? It’s not.. I don’t go somewhere and think _ Ah yeah. Been here before _ . ‘Smore like… The thought happens, _ then _ my brain catches up.”

"You make no sense sometimes, my dear fellow, I hope you know that." Aziraphale reached over and gave him a gentle pat on the knee.

What a neat trick. Now he felt sloshed again.

He wasn’t able to censor himself this time. “Are you miracling the water in my blood into wine and back again?”

Aziraphale gave him a slow blink.

_ Oh. Fuck. _ “Er, nevermind. Must be me.” _ What in Heaven’s name is wrong with me? _ The angel just shook his head. Apparently writing him off as hopeless.

Aziraphale reached over, plucking the end of Crowley’s extravagantly pointed hood to inspect it. The demon leaned in a little closer to allow the fabric more give.“You know, you could have made the end of this look like a snake head.”

Crowley felt a trembling thing trapped in his chest. He wasn’t sure if it was laughter or tears. It ached just a little, but it was tender and sweet. All the things he shouldn’t have stuffed into his ribcage. It was also unbearable, exquisitely tortuous. It felt a bit like having broken ribs. “That’d be a bit much, don’t you think?”

And there it was. Aziraphale smiled. A real, genuine _ smile _ and it brought everything, the whole bloody, awful century to a standstill. The first ray of sunshine in God only knew how long. It was a completely mundane thing, yet it still felt awesome and it crumbled cliff faces and mountain ranges in Crowley’s chest.

He felt his lips spasm a bit as he smiled back. Almost against his will. He reached over and he tugged at the angel’s arm, until they were lying in the grass, shoulder to shoulder. His atoms seemed particularly excited where they touched.

It almost felt like he was floating down a celestial river, made of stars. A long-forgotten sensation. _ Oh… that’s you… isn’t it? _ He glanced over at Aziraphale, where the angel was staring at the sky raptly. And how strange and wonderful it was that he could see both the ghosts of his stars and their current state in Aziraphale’s eyes too? Like they were a gateway into the cosmos. The curve of them an overturned cup, navy-black and dotted with stars.

Crowley settled back and enjoyed the sensation a little more. Something cool and soothing wrapped itself around his heart. Holding it with gentle hands. His breath hitched.

“Aziraphale?”

“Hm?”

Crowley had nothing. He wasn’t sure why the angel’s name just… escaped him. He didn’t have one of his _ insights _ to help him. Not that they had ever, at all, been useful. As far as the angel was concerned.

“Crowley?”

The snake shifted in the grass, not really sure what to say.

“Crowley?” The angel said his name but what he heard was ‘_Are you alright?’ _

He wasn’t sure how to answer that.

“What do you _ want _ Crowley?” There was an edge to the angel’s voice. It made him think of the sensation of a comforting hand clamping around his throat. And maybe it had been shielding a vulnerable point, rather than throttling him.

He swallowed thickly, tongue dragging across his lips.

How on earth could he possibly say what he wanted, when he didn’t know himself? _ I want you to choke my corporation until I figure out what your Divine presence was doing? Until it feels like mercy? Until I can puzzle out the senseless, ineffable thing that’s _ really _ you that’s woven into the fabric of Creation? _ But you couldn’t just _ say _ things like that to your Sworn Adversary of almost five and a half millennia.

_ I want to trace my lips everywhere yours have touched. Not just this bottle, and I couldn't tell you why. I don’t want to ever move again, and it isn’t Sloth it’s because I’m spent. Used up. Nothing left. Here lies Crowley. Worn out before the final battle between Heaven and Hell. Unworthy Adversary to the last._

Crowley’s mouth formed the words before he knew where his sentence was going. “I wouldn’t mind, if you were the one to smite me.”

There was absolute silence, and Crowley felt the current of that celestial river go still. Had he heard a little gasp? Had he imagined that intake of breath? Time resumed, and he was being carried aloft on the black, star-hung fabric of space again.

“I.. I’m not the smiting kind.”

Why did that make him want to rend his clothes and go into mourning? Why did that bring him despair? _ Please, angel, Guardian of the Eastern Gate—won’t you smite me, if I ask for it? I think it would be alright, if it was you, at the end of Everything. _

“Oh no? Not even a little? Not for anyone? Just a bit of smiting?” Why did it feel like they were having a parallel conversation? Why did Crowley need a map to navigate his half? Why did it feel like that word should mean something else? There was only one thing that word meant. It meant heavenly wrath and holy fire, holy water, and eradication. (But that was _ wrong_. It meant something else too. It meant…)

“You’re not so terrible that you need to be smited, Crowley.” Aziraphale said the words low and careful. Directly into his ear. A whisper that vibrated deep into his bones. Into the places where his snake instincts lived. A secret. Not shameful. Just ancient and private. (Too late, the rest of that insight was out of reach.)

“Smitten.”

_ I want to know what that word is going to mean. _

_ I want to skip the rest of this century and find a nice black hole we can settle into to hunker down and wait this out. I want to stop fighting a stupid, exhausting battle of wills that I started without knowing what I was getting into. For that matter, yes, I want to stop fighting myself. I want to tear up the covenant I drew up in Eden. I want to drown in this ribbon-river of the cosmos you’ve manifested here. Baptize me and let me be reborn. Maybe I’ll be something better this go around. Something yours. _

_ Something that can see all your wonder-terror like I used to, not just pieces. I used to be the same as you, you know. I’m more terror than wonder now. _

_ I think sometimes they still see the shadow of what I was. What I’m not anymore. What I refuse to be. Maybe that’s why they beg me for deliverance I can’t give. Why? Why did I make such a stupid promise? I want to help._

_I want to care less about Good and Evil._

_ I want mercy that doesn’t come in a bottle. _

_ I want to be better than this. _

“Oh… So it is.” Crowley felt the barest press of the angel’s fingertips through his sleeve, resting just a few inches above his wrist.

It had been a long century. The longest yet, but in a moment of clarity—not insight—Crowley realized he didn’t want this night to ever end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Crowley has the most useless form of pre-cognition and I love it and I need to figure out how to tag it.
> 
> According to Merriam-Webster: Around 1650, smitten began to refer not simply to being struck, but to being struck with affection or longing.
> 
> Also fuck consistent chapter lengths I guess. Have a chapter that is longer than the previous ones combined RIP me lol. (EDIT: And and even BIGGER fuck you to consistent chapter lengths, I guess.)
> 
> Rejected summary: And lo, Crowley looked upon the Left Hand of God, the Most Holy Archangel Michael and thought: _What a wanker._

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on the [tumblr](https://liquidlyrium.tumblr.com/) and discord Lyrium_Seeker#3439 if you wanna yell at me.
> 
> Fic title and chapter titles from They Might Be Giant's _Birdhouse in your Soul_


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